If you’re recently engaged, you’ve just hit the part of wedding planning where expectation meets reality. After collecting ideas and pinning a million pins on Pinterest, you’ve added it all up and realized, Crap, the wedding you planned on Pinterest is expensive. This, my friends, is what we call wedding sticker shock. This is a great time to sit back, reflect on your priorities, and hit the reset button on your imagination.
So start with your budget. There are two main factors to consider when setting your budget:
- How much can we afford to spend?
- How much do we want to spend?
Many people go into wedding planning with the goal of spending $5–10k. That seems like a hell of a lot to spend on a party, and it is probably way more than you’ve ever spent on a party before. While it is certainly a significant chunk of money, the hard truth most couples face not too far into planning, is that even a huge chunk of money doesn’t easily buy the Modern American Wedding (you know, the one with the sit-down dinner and the professional photographers and the everything-letter pressed, etc.).
So, do you need to step away from Pinterest? Maybe, or maybe just realize that one of the beautiful things about pins is that you can delete them from a board when you realize that rustic-chic backdrop will cost several thousand dollars to re-create. You can indeed, with a little extra work, have a wedding (even a Modern American Wedding), that you love, at a price point that works for you. And remember that, in the end, the very most amazing part of your wedding isn’t going to be the venue, the food, or the photos—it’s going to be the fact that you stood in a space, surrounded by all of the people you love most in the world, and committed yourself to your partner.