Why Wedding Budgets Are So Hard (And How To Make It Easier)

Budgeting is Hard Because of Lack of Usable Info

You've probably heard us say that the wedding industry doesn't provide couples with good budgeting information. Averages and percentages mean almost nothing for overly broad categories like “Decor” and “Attire”. Some weddings cost $100,000 in decor alone, while others cost $1000. To average the two together is just a bad use of math.

So when the national wedding publications declare that the average couple spent $30,000 on their wedding in 2022, that includes New York City couples and couples from Fort Wayne, Indiana. It includes weddings with 500 guests, and weddings with 4, making it very difficult to know what you should expect to pay for your perfect wedding.

So why don't the large wedding publications provide better pricing information?

What's Involved in Wedding Pricing

There are 5 things that affect what something will cost you for your wedding:

1. Your guest count

2. Location, and the options and availability of services in your area

3. Your desired quality level

4. Your knowledge of how pricing works for the product or service you desire

5. The time and energy you have to search for the best price

An Example: Wedding Florals

How do you know how much you need to spend on flowers when you don't know how much flowers cost, how to manage that cost to best meet your needs, and how to know what a florist with the right skill level for you will charge for their time and supplies? To create a wedding budget, you need to know a LOT about wedding vendors and materials.

An amazing local farm near my house grows flowers and sells them at a roadside stand. You can buy a huge bouquet of stunning blooms for $15 that would easily cost $150 from a wedding florist.

So wouldn’t any sane person buy from the farm rather than from the florist?

It depends.

The flowers cut from the farm are those that are in perfect bloom that particular day. So they will use whatever colors and styles happen to be blooming. If the weather has been particularly rainy, the colors from the same seeds will be quite different than they were the year before. One type of bloom may have gotten sick and couldn’t be harvested at all. Some of the flowers will be wildflowers, and others will be peonies or dahlias, and the customer doesn’t get to pick and choose.

So if your style is bohemian and natural, you could have someone pick up 2 dozen bouquets the morning of your wedding and distribute some around your reception space in mason jars. And for $300 you’d have a lush display of gorgeous blooms. Your color scheme would probably be red, orange, yellow, and violet, with a touch of white occasionally. But you’d have to get the blooms that very morning because they won’t be treated for long life. You’d then need the right vases for them because they won’t be cleaned of leaves or thorns.

The flowers from the florist are very different. First, they are grown by specialty farms that only grow the strongest, largest, most beautiful varietals of each flower type. So the roses are larger, have more interesting colors, and last much longer. The farms ship them to a wholesaler, who buys a steady supply and coordinates what will be available based on each farm’s production cycle and current weather. Flower shops then consult a guide provided by the wholesaler to know when each type of bloom will most likely be in stock. This guide allows them to have a creative meeting with their client where, together, they develop a color scheme, a style, and an overall vision for the wedding florals. The florist uses the wholesaler guides to create a bloom-by-bloom composition of flowers for each arrangement.

If the client loves the vision and the pricing, the florist knows they can commit to producing these florals. The weather may affect the available blooms a bit, but the florist's relationship and experience with the wholesaler will give them the confidence to proceed with the contract.

If the client wants to adjust the blooms to fit their budget a bit better, the florist recommends replacement blooms that cost a bit less and, using their experience and good judgment, won’t alter the overall vision too much. The florist and client repeat this process as many times as necessary until the vision and budget match perfectly.

When the flowers arrive in the floral studio, they have typically been shipped via overnight carrier from Holland, Bolivia, or any number of other countries to the wholesaler, then are driven in a refrigerated truck to the florist. They are packed tightly in boxes and are not yet in bloom. The florist cleans them and puts them in the perfect conditions (amount of water, food, and temperature) for their specific bloom. Some flowers need coaxing so that on wedding day you have the perfect combination of full bloom, partial bloom, and budding flowers.

After a couple of days of letting the blooms mature, the florist gets to work on design, using their massive walk-in fridge to store finished work as they go.

Finally, on wedding day, they arrive at the venue with a van (or two) packed full of centerpieces, bouquets, boutonnieres, wrist corsages, and flower crowns. Then come buckets and buckets of flowers waiting to become a massive wedding arch.

Which one is better for your wedding? That completely depends on who you are. It depends on your style, ability to enlist reliable help, and desire to control quality. Both can be stunning. Both can be perfect. But usually one is much more RIGHT for you and your needs.

And if any of this information was new to you, you can imagine how hard it is to understand similar pricing issues from a dozen other types of vendors.

The Solution

Creating a wedding budget that uses your money wisely without a lot of mistakes or waste means bolstering your knowledge of what options are out there for you to choose from and how pricing works for the product or service you desire.

We are the first wedding planners I know of (seriously, I've never seen this done before) to explain in detail what you get for your money at each budget level for each wedding expense. In other words, what would I get if I spent $300 on a dress versus $3000? What would be the difference in quality? Would the more expensive dress include things I don't even care about? Or is the $300 dress missing many of the things that I do care about?

Without our tool, budgeting feels nearly impossible for most couples. Most ended up booking their venue and just hoping that all the other expenses would be affordable when the time came to book them. And most couples go over budget considerably when they don't budget properly.

A better budget would have told them what they needed to prepare for earlier. But just as often, it would have alerted them to wiser choices they could have made to save thousands of dollars.

My biggest piece of advice to couples planning their wedding budget is this: take whatever time you need to feel confident in your budget BEFORE you set a wedding date, book a venue, or even talk about your wedding with your loved ones. Wedding planning takes on a frantic energy the moment you announce your engagement, and the only defense is to claim that you're not ready to start planning yet. This is your window to solidify your wedding vision and budget privately without getting verbally committed to any particular type or size of wedding. Get your ducks in a row so that you retain the maximum number of good options and control your planning path.

To make your life easier, download our Every-Kind-Of-Wedding Budget Tool. We did the research, so you don't have to! Whether you are on a micro-budget or you want everything a celebrity would have, this tool is the single most useful resource if you want to plan stress-free. Download here: https://bit.ly/TEWbudget