Hit by the budget reality!

It's a pretty average figure tbh, but it could be £4k and still not be the right wedding for your budget. If you can afford £8k then that's what you should work to. a 50% hike is a lot. If you want to pay £12k then that's what it should be, as long as you can affortd it. A wedding is not worth stretching your finances to breaking point for or going into debt you can't live with, or simply costing what you are not comfortable with. You might be able to afford a £50k wedding, but if spending £5k doesn't sit comfortably then you have to cut your cloth. It is a fantastic day yes, but it is but one day.

Hope that makes sense lol x

Yes it does Thank you. I am going to go through it all and see if there is anything I can rethink. It's not an undoable amount, but will be the most either of us has ever spent in pretty much one go.

I had a teeny budget of £3k. We have (so far) spent £4k, and that's still only for a very intimate wedding of 28 guests, a high street wedding gown and a very reasonably priced evening reception! If we didn't need to be strict with finances and gave ourselves longer to plan, we could very easily have spent double our budget, perhaps threefold.

£12000 doesn't surprise me at all. Especially for those numbers. But I guess it depends entirely on venue choice; a barn or village hall would bring the budget down considerably compared to a stately home or castle, for example.

We had a budget for about £12000, after working everything out its closer to £18000, so only a tad over budget... Thank god my OH got a promotion! Ha its scary how easily and fast that amount of money can be spent. Neither of us feel greived about spending so much, after all its only once we plan on doing it we want it to be something special

My origonal plan with the venue I really fell in love with would have put us around 16000. I have since then enquired elsewhere giving me this sort of estimate. I know a big chunk of it is the fact we said we would pay for the groomsmen and brideamaids outfits, which was before H2B informed me of the fact his plan for 2 best men and 4 groomsmen. So with him, them and our fathers that would make suit hire for 9 men grr. So may have to rethink that, luckily we havent actually told anyone we had planned on paying. That or he needs to cut out a couple of his men haha

We have similar numbers to you, started out with a 10K budget & that's now gone up to 13K with all suppliers booked/costs agreed, and day guest figs down to 70 due to some no's. So my advice is always give yourself a cushion - its very hard to stay in budget! And we had to give up/economize/downsize some things that we really wanted - like, we're doing a diy photobooth instead of hiring a company in, and we're having cheaper favours than originally planned. We're also having in-season flowers in our colours rather than telling the florist what flowers to use.

I was adamant that we were not going to spend more than £5000 on a wedding. We've upped that to £7000 but only because two night's accommodation are supplied for all guests. As we're about 28 people in total that works out brilliantly for us.

We have the funds to spend more but don't see the point. I might be different if you're on the younger side (we're touching 40's), and less pragmatic.

Enjoy whatever you decide upon as long as you don't borrow money to pay for it.

Opinions may vary!

If I had my wedding in Scotland in a hotel it would have cost around 20k which is an obscene amount of money for 1 day, I say stick to what you can afford. Even whittle down your guest list, have a buffet instead of a sit down meal, don't have a cake etc......as all these things add up. It's about deciding on what you really want, how much you can spend, good luck as its not an easy task x

Ours is £14,000 but we've spent £1500 on accommodation and £1400 on a band which is slightly excessive IMO, £12k sounds like you can do a lot with. We've got 103 day guests, and 26 evening guests. My dress was the second most expensive item at £1400 so it would prob be 3-4k less if we didn't splurge on a few excessive costs.

your day will be amazing whether you've got 8k or £20k it's what you make it, I've been to beautiful weddings that were 4k and grand ones that were 45k and had equally amazing days at both!

My Experience of Hitched is that you can plan a wedding with whatever budget you have and some of the best weddings I've seen on here have had the lowest budgets.

So just work to whatever you can afford as there are definitely ways to save money.

I had no idea what a wedding cost when I first started planning so it was a shock when I actually started getting quotes in for different things and venues, especially when if fell in love with my venue and it cost more than I had thought a whole wedding would cost. But if I couldn't afford it I wouldn't have had it and that's the most important thing... Yes, stretch yourself but don't bankrupt yourself.

We started on 4k. now up to 8k but very nearly done (should hopefully come under that). it was heading to the 10 mark until we decided some things were just too expensive (we switched the bigmoon to a minimoon at a lincolnshire lodge). we have had to make a lot ourselves, or just let some things go. we are having 67 day guests plus 120 evening, sit down meal and evening do until 12. the main money has been spent on the venue, reg and tog - the essentials. and um, my frock...

We are having a very small wedding with just 12-14 guests and we are looking at around £6500 (not including rings). This includes accommodation for us in the honeymoon suite of a hotel for 2 nights but it does not include cost for cake and invites yet as my OH's aunts are making those for us so I reckon we will only pay for the material/ingredients if anything.

We have a spreadsheet to keep track of the cost and we keep track of everything, even things like the guestbook which cost less than £10. Everything goes into the spreadsheet and we update any estimates with actual figures as soon as we know it.

We did take out a small loan which we are comfortable with paying back within a relatively short time and both our parents contributed some money as well (about half the cost). The reason for the loan was that we are planning at quite short notice and after buying a house together 3 months ago our savings are depleted. But I really wanted us to get married this year, I didn't want to wait another year. I would not recommend taking out a large loan or getting a loan you can't afford paying back.

There would have also been lots of things we could have done to make our wedding cheaper but we have decided we are going to do it "properly" and as we don't want to have any regrets later.

@ GBTBR when are you getting married?

I went to the National wedding fayre in Birmingham in feb and got an amazing deal for the mens suits from formal affair.

I know that around oct/nov they have the national fayre's again if you go to 1 there are some great deals to be had

good luck in your planning xx

No date set yet, but likely to be next summer. Thanks for the tip

Like others have said, its about cutting your cloth and choosing whats really important to you.

We really wanted a beautiful ceremony in a gorgeous location and a massive party with lots of good food!

Firstly we realised our local registry office is ugly as and to find a lisenced venue was pricey pricey!! We then discovered that a friends wedding we had been to recently was actually a blessing and they'd done the legal bit the day before, none of us had any idea!! By doing this we'll only pay about £150 all in for the actual legal bit (including giving notice) and it meant we could find a venue without a lisence. We looked out of the box for a venue and found a local watersports centre which is bang on the coast and has the most stunning views. They are a residential centre so there is basic acommodation and a massive main hall which can be used for functions which leads out onto a large patio area overlooking the water. They also have a roof top terrace overlooking the coast and when I mentioned we wanted a 'blessing' she said we could use the roof!

The venue charges £250 hire for the day and then they can do as much or as little for us.

Next as the big party element was important to us were now getting married at 3, having a drinks reception and then going straight into the evening reception with hot food. We've been looking at street food vendors and look like we are going to book an american grill doing these deli subs which are AMAZING and also a pizza oven doing a mini individual pizza for each. This comes in at about £1200 based on 120 people. They will all get to have the hugest sub ever and a pizza and a selection of sides

We're also looking differently for everything. For example my OH wants a waistcoat suit, no jacket. We've looked online and found we can buy them for £40 We'll be providing the trousers, waistcoat and tie for the men but asking them to get their own white shirt (well we do have 10 men to buy for!). This is so much cheaper than even hiring one!

Hope this helps

Ours probably came in slightly below 12k if you don't include the honeymoon. More if you do.

There of course is a balance between what you want to spend and what you can reasonably afford. I'm a self confessed tight arse when it comes to anything except camera equipment ? but with the wedding I did appreciate that this was the one & only time I was going to do it so i threw caution to the wind and spent as much as we could justify without having to borrow or go into debt for.

Our wedding is costing £17k and its more than we could realistically afford! We just got carried away when we fell in love with the perfect but expensive venue and talked ourselves into booking it despite it costing over half our budget for the venue and catering alone! We have struggled with putting every spare penny into the day and cutting back on everything else to make it work. We are still behind where we should be which is very stressful plus we have a baby on the way just to up the ante!

we screwed it up from the start but I'm confident it will work out in the end. My regret is getting carried away and not sticking to the budget for each individual item. My advice to everyone starting out is to work the budget out based on what you can afford to comfortably save without leaving yourself short every month and plan the wedding around that, not the other way around. It will be less stressful in the long run if you commit to that.