Wendy and Robert rocked a costume wedding that we loved. We featured their nerf gun duel recently. Wendy shared with us their $20k wedding budget that we felt would be an awesome sample wedding budget for working with a similar budget.
They used You Need a Budget, a very cool app that is good for everyday life in addition to free wedding budget planning. Then they exported an Excel spreadsheet into a Google sheet to see it all laid out. If you want got downloadable budget spreadsheets in our big ol' wedding binder here!
Their wedding budget spreadsheet contains two breakdowns: one for major different categories (like cake, photography, common headings most people work with during the wedding planning process) and then all the individual categories they used. They had about 78 people attending the wedding including themselves with a total budget of slightly over the $20k mark, for reference.
Here's what Wendy had to say about it:
We aimed to keep the wedding events costs to $20k or less, but a few things caught us off guard — the hair/beauty costs crept up, stationery is expensive even when DIYing the whole lot, the 22 custom (and so worth it!) boutonnieres, and the outfits were up there as well. Everything else was pretty much as expected (or as quoted). So it was under $23k in the end.
We plan to recoup some of the costs by on selling the lolly jars, unused costumes and accessories on the local by/swap/sell, eBay, etc.
Caveat: if this doesn't look like your wedding expenses budget, NO WORRIES! Thi sis just one sample of what a ~$20k budget could look like.
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