Our First Official Wedding Planning Meeting and Budget Tracking
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A quick tally of the major expenses of our wedding so far is as follows:
| Wedding Items | Price |
| Banquet hall (includes food, reception, and ceremony) | $13,500 |
| Wedding coordinator | $900 |
| Wedding Cake | ??? (~ $300) |
| Flower | ??? ($500 - $2000 depending) |
| Minister | ??? (~ $200) |
| Photographer / Videographer | ??? (~ $500 - $1,500) |
| Misc (wedding invitation, thank you cards, gifts for guest etc etc) | $1,000 |
| Total | $16,900 - $19,400 |
As you can see, there are many things that can still fluctuate at this point. For example, the wedding cake, flowers and photographers can be very inexpensive or they can cost us all our life savings depending on how elaborate we want our wedding to be.
On the budget side, the $10,000 as mentioned earlier quickly became $20,000 as we will be inviting many more people than planned. This is coupled by an unexpected hike in cost per person. By next Friday (July 27, 2007), we will have to pay a $3,900 deposit to reserve the banquet hall. The interesting aspect of this resort is that they allow credit card payment, meaning an automatic 2%+ savings for me because of my credit card rewards. It might not sound like much, but 2% of $20,000 is $400 dollars!
We are also hoping that our friends and relatives will help the huge expense a little bit by being generous with our wedding gifts but those things are never guaranteed. When it comes down to it, what is important to us is having a happy and memorable wedding that we can cherish together for the rest of our lives.
I am happy that we picked a venue (again, last time I mentioned that we decided on having it on a boat). In a few days, we are going to fax the credit card authorization form over and putting the couple thousand dollar deposit down will for sure guarantee that we cannot change our minds.
Our next steps are to figure out the details of the wedding cake, minister selection, photographers and the miscellaneous items.
Are we missing anything? Please help me by leaving comments if we are missing something in our planning! I will keep everyone updated on our progress and start filling in our wedding planning details in the table above in future posts.
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I don’t see a mention of music or a bar tab. Are those included in the reception (and therefore covered by the banquet hall cost)
Also, for the flowers-you may want to check in to renting silk flower arrangements to decorate for the ceremony, and then just going with fresh for the bouquet, corsages and boutineers.
Good luck!
Jenn: Thanks for the advice! The reception does not have a bar tab since we will only have a toast and people chatting outside a dinner banquent “room”.
What do you mean by silk flower arrangements though since that will probably be a major money saver.
Thanks for your wishes. The wedding will make things very very busy
awe, sorry to hear the boat is out. Hope your day is awesome. Looking forward to hearing about it as it approaches.
Adam: Yeah there were concerns from family members about sea sickness too so that sort of helped push it to a mroe conventional approach. I will share more details as we progress.