2009 Wedding Lessons Learned: When Your Wedding Budget Is Out of Control

2009 Wedding Lessons Learned

Regardless of what number your wedding budget is; you've put a budget in place to make sure that you don't start wildly spending here and there and start putting the person who foots the bill in future financial jeopardy. Remember that while the wedding day is a very important day in your life, its one day, while your marriage is forever.

In an ideal world, you'd find vendors that fit into your budget from the get go, rather than booking vendors that begin to stretch your budget, forcing you to start scrambling on where you can cut and delete to reign the spending in. When you are interviewing vendors and gathering ideas, keep in mind that regardless of what you plan for the day - your guests won't know what you spent on the day unless you tell them. So, if there is a way to bring costs down but still be classy: DO IT.

I had one such wedding this year - it was simply a divine affair, but they very much had a budget and they very much had to stick with it. But yet, throughout the planning, the spending started getting out of control and a month before the wedding we had to sit down and go through proposals and contracts and figure out what adjustments needed to be made so that they could actually afford the wedding day {I was the DOC for it}. It wasn't the most pleasant day in their wedding planning process simply because I had to be the non-emotional voice of reason aka "the bad guy" saying that this, this and this had to be cut and this, this and this had to be changed. At the end of our meeting, we had reigned in the spending but the stress of going back to vendors and re-negotiating contracts wasn't exactly what the bride and groom wanted to be doing during their final month of engagement. Had they not spent so freely when they were choosing vendors, they wouldn't have been put in the scramble position. Everything worked out for the wedding weekend - but free spending = more stress in the end. They also decided to cut some labor costs from certain vendors that were passed along to the waitstaff which wasn't appropriate - so please, if you've hired a florist, pay for them to do the arrangements - its a part of their job.

If you've got a budget, aim to stick to it and keep in mind - when you come up with the number - pad it a bit for last minute things!