Budgets - where to start?

missiemog

how did you all get started on budgets? did you have money and plan it from there, or had an idea/plan of what you wanted and then got the money together?

i have no money together, and don't know where to start!!

help please!

thanks in advance.

RainbowDrops

We're having a bit of help from both sets of parents, so the first step was to ask them how mush they were happy to contribute.
We looked at a few venues to get an idea of prices to see what diference there is for more / less money.

The rest was dependent on or savings.

Lexxi

It'll depend on what kind of wedding you want, a small wedding can come in under £1000. We gave ourselves a guide of £5000 as we thought we would be able to save that and just make things fit the budget.
A good idea is to decide when you want to get married and how much you can save in the months up to that date, £200 at 10 months will give you a £2000 budget, you may think that the venue you want is worth waiting an extra 12 months of saving for.

Emma1988

Just write a list of what you really want, a list of 'if we have the money' and a list of not bothered abouts! and get your OH to do the same. Talk about it. For us it was the venue, our parents are paying for this and its going to be about 5000 for venue, food and to get married. Also we are really low income earners but we budget well and are realistic that many we will be having to put some of it on the CC nearer the time.. but hey ho you only do this once!We arent having cars and are getting friends to do lots of little extras. Stationary we are doing ourselves expect for the guestbook, table numbers and invites. Think, thats really nice but could i get it cheaper elsewhere. the answer most of the time is yes! Ebay. For us spending 1000 on a cake is silly, getting cars for 5 mins is also silly. But having a nice venue isnt. but thats just us. many people do a spreadsheet, we did but we havent looked at it for over a year and half the time you dont really know what your going to spend until your buying it!

Good luck and look forward to seeing you on the forum!

xtinkersx

what I did was write how much we could comfortably afford to put away each month without 'noticing' and then worked it out over the number of months till everything would have to be paid up (2 months before i did it for) and then got a total and stuck to that x

MissPixie

We worked out how much we could put away a month and then set the date so that we had plenty of time to get it all together and now we are ahead of where we should be buy putting everything away we can! We are paying for it all ourselves and we are students but we are still managing the whole day/sit down meal/evening buffet thing.

xtinkersx

we're also having no help and only have one income so it is manageable xx

malamay

I had a bit of money my grandfather gave me a couple years ago in savings, and we've been putting away £200 a month or more in regular savings. We are having the wedding we want, but perhaps with a longer engagement than some, to enable us to save up for it!

We did start with a spreadsheet at the beginning; I got a lot of inspiration from wedding sites like youandyourwedding.co.uk and confetti that have their own budgeting guides. It was easy for us to see where we'd overspend, and what we could cut down on. We don't have a set budget for things now, but I'm more comfortable in drawing the line when something comes in too expensive, or snapping up a bargain when I see one!

floss2

We did the "how much can we save without noticing" sums, then set the date & worked out how much we would have to spend. Then we wrote guest lists and did endless Excel spreadsheets to work out what we could afford to do.

missiemog

thanks for the responses. gives me an idea.

i'm kind of impatient, but i suppose i'll have to save up and wait a bit!!

xx:A

blondeprincess

We are having to pay for our whole wedding

I had no idea what weddings cost really, so we went looking at venues got some ideas for figures. When we found the place we wanted to get married, we got a price & then made a spreadsheet on things we would like in our big day & got a figure to work towards

We worked out roughly what we could save each month & we know roughly what we want to spend on our wedding. I dont work really at the moment so it is my OH that is having to put money aside but i am going to look at working abit more so that i can help chip into the wedding fund