You've got a budget...now what??

So, you've searched for the perfect setting, you've made your lists, and you have an idea of how much you have (or don't have) to spend on your dream wedding. Now what do you do? Well, it's pretty simple really. You just have to break it down for yourself!

Now that you have your list set and you know roughly how much you want to spend on different elements of your wedding, you can see if those individual costs fit within your estimated budget. A good way to do this is to make a spreadsheet! S and I sat down and made one pretty early on and trust me, it helped a lot! It saved us a lot of time trying to decide whether or not we could afford something. We would plug it into the budget and see if we were over or not.

S and I started out by making a list of categories (i.e. flowers, catering, alcohol) and putting estimated amounts next to each category and our grand total/budget at the bottom. Whenever something was finalized, meaning we booked a vendor and were sure of the total cost, that item then became bold so we knew it could not change. We could then play around with our other "estimates" to see how much we had left in the other categories. It became sort of like a puzzle. Not too fun at times, but made it much easier to see all the numbers together on one page and how they added up.

To get you started, Husband and I have put up a sample spreadsheet to get you started. Included are some of the categories that we used but feel free to add your own.

Download file here.