A most excellent sample wedding budget ($20k edition)

A most excellent sample wedding budget ($20k edition)

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Wendy and Robert rocked a steampunk-themed costume wedding that we loved. We featured their steampunk duel recently. Wendy shared with us their $20k wedding budget that we felt would be an awesome sample wedding budget for anyone rocking that general area of price tag.

They used You Need a Budget, a very cool app that is good for everyday life in addition to wedding budget planning. Then they exported Excel spreadsheets to see it all laid out. (We've got downloadable budget spreadsheets in our big ol' wedding binder here!)

The spreadsheet contains two breakdowns: one for major categories, common headings most people work with, and then all the individual categories they used. They had about 78 people attending the wedding including themselves with a total budget of slightly over the $20k mark, for reference.

(Click to embiggen, opens in a new window)

Here's what Wendy had to say about it:

We aimed to keep the wedding costs to $20k or less, but a few things caught us off guard - the hair/beauty costs crept up, stationery is expensive even when DIYing the whole lot, the 22 custom (and so worth it!) boutonnieres, and the outfits were up there as well. Everything else was pretty much as expected (or as quoted). So it was under $23k in the end.

We plan to recoup some of the costs by on selling the lolly jars, unused costumes and accessories on the local by/swap/sell, eBay, etc.

Caveat: if this doesn't look like your wedding budget, NO WORRIES! Don't let this be a model for you, just a sample of what a ~$20k budget could look like.

More sample wedding budgets:

Don't forget to grab our Google Drive spreadsheets to get your budget (and other organization tools) started!

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