We have started looking at venues but I don't even know where to start when planning our budget! Any tips/advice?
Hi just work out how much you both can afford to spend and how much if available your parents are able to contribute:)
I would say work out how much you can afford before you go venue hunting - its devastating to find a venue you love and then find you can't afford it. Speak to parents to see if they are willing contribute and how much and also how much you can afford yourselves.
Work out how much you can afford to spend on the wedding as a whole and split it between the different bits which are important to you.
When thinking about the venue, your guest list is a big thing as that will impact price and which venues are suitable
I do it the other way round. I look at what I want and how much it will cost. Then I work out how I can save for it and whether it is feasible. There may then be some trimming of costs to fit what I can realistically afford.
The first thing I did was had a conversaiton with my other, half and parents to work out what exactely we could afford to save within the time frame, what contributions we were able to get from family to work out ball park what we can afford. Then I downloaded a couple of wedding budgets online. Whilst some of those have quite high spend, it does help to provide all the different parts of a wedding that you need to account for and what ratio of the budget spend they take up. Then I just adjusted the numbers as appropriate to give a rough idea of what the budget I had was. Then I started looking at lots of venues online. Most of them you can get prices in their brochures, so I costed them all out based on the date we wanted. I set myself a hard limit on some of them and if the costs went over I didn't even go and see them as I didn't want to go and see somewhere - fell in love and couldn't afford it. Finally shortlisted to about 5 to go and visit (from about 20 on my spreadsheet)! Hope that helps :)!
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