Affording your wedding

These are all great couple-as-team saving plans. In my case, we planned in 5 months and used extra (existing) income and tax returns. We had a gift from my parents. My husband chose to work 6 days a week. No honeymoon. You may find that one of you is very specific and willing to splurge, while the other is more frugal. Let the frugal one run the budget and research reasonable vendors. You may butt heads at times. I gave my husband the wedding he wanted at 18k under our initial budget (COVID also trimmed our guestlist), and we felt so good that we added a couple extras and gifts for each other. Best wishes.

We had a hard rule of a guest list under 100 and we stuck with it, keeping total spending down. Covid actually helped us financially by forcing us to postpone our date. Long engagement has its cons but ...all those deposits that go toward the final bill, my dress + shoes, wood bouquets and décor was spent slowly over the course of 2 years now that came from monthly extra spending money and not our savings.

Just the other day I was panicking about our 1500 catering estimate only to remember that 1,000 of it is already paid. Multiply that by every vendor so I was over estimating how much is going to hit us next month when we make final payments.

Also skip flowers either completely or just do bouquets only.

We started saving when we moved in together coz we already knew we wanted to marry each other and have (at least) 1 kid(s) together .Our saving wasn't strictly for a wedding but also for future kid(s) tuition fees & our retirement.
We had enough money before starting our planning.
In fact, we didn't want a formal,traditional,lavish wedding and knew we would only splurge on photography, DJ, food, cake,bar and we would save on everything else: dress (not important to me so I'll buy one at a department store) , decor ( no flowers at all, not even a bouquet/bout, no aisle runner, table runners, candles...), no videographers and even on the venue (a restaurant) since great venue doesn't mean great marriage.
We picked an off-season date (4-30) and our guest count is 90 max: 80 invited, 10 "maybe": 10 are single, so in case they start a relationship LOL. But we are nixing family and parents' friends we haven't BOTH met and no under 18 allowed.My parents wanted to pay: we said no. They offered 50%: NO.They offered for 1-2 vendors: NOOOOOOOO . We want to pay ourselves (including engag. party but aren't having a rehears. dinner coz no wedding party), coz we can afford it and a parental help would equal a wedding in a church ( ours is secular) and inviting many parents' friends + ext. family we've never met or seen in years. Paying ourselves means we make ALL the rules, have the vibe anw the guest count we want.Sorry for being overly chatty 😀😋.

I started travel nursing specificaso we could afford our wedding, honeymoon and hopefully a second house.

My fiancé and I started a joint savings account a couple months after getting engaged. We started putting a little bit of money maybe $25-$100 a paycheck in the account, for two years, it was whatever we could afford. We found an affordable venue, a catering service that is reasonable enough, and some other price friendly vendors.