The ABC's of Wedding Planning

So after writing my last post I sat down and really thought about how I was planning my wedding and I realized I was doing it with three simple letters, ABC.

Last time I talked to you about how is C is for Compromise. So today, this blog is brought to you by the letter B, and B is for... Budget!

 As I previously stated, Zack and I are paying for the wedding on our own. When we first sat down to talk about a wedding budget (before we got engaged, oops!) we had no clue how much a wedding actually cost! Doing a little bit of research we found that the average cost of a wedding is $27,800!!! (Figure via The Knot.) The average cost of a wedding in Ohio is a little better at $23,645. (Figure via Average Wedding Cost.) Zack and I both have jobs, and here very soon we will both be working full time again. Using these numbers (and a little bit of math about our average salary and how much we could realistically save during our engagement) we set our budget at $20,000. Now, some people include their rings and honeymoon in this figure, we did not. My ring is on a Kay card and we bought my engagement ring and band as a set. Zack's ring is going to be special ordered off of Etsy and we don't expect it to cost too much. As for our honeymoon, we have big, big plans but we both know that if we have to, we are willing to put it off to have an amazing wedding.

Last time I told you guys about how we decided on compromising on certain things to make our budget work harder for us. Using this we creating a Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of our budget, what we wanted to spend, and what we were spending.

A screenshot of our spreadsheet.

I really, really love Google Docs. I can access it from my phone, Kindle, and laptop. I can also share it with Zack so that he can access it as well. The numbers we used in the "estimate" column are from WeddingWire.com. They have an amazing setup and I used it for a long time before I decided I wanted something a little more mobile. As you can see, we are currently over budget on our venue and our photography, this is because we already have our numbers for these two vendors and they are more expensive than Wedding Wire allotted us. To make things even out, we are going to shave some money out of other areas. We are also waiting on an email back from our coordinator at The Darby House about a discrepancy with our quote which will hopefully help our venue come closer to our budget!

Budget is one of my biggest concerns going into the wedding. Sometimes I wonder if we have champagne taste on a beer budget, but we will make it work!

How did your budget shake out?