Trying to determine what would be a suitable budget

Moving your wedding further away would give you more time to save up and therefore might allow you to have a bigger budget

You should figure out how much you two can save roughly each paycheck and then add that up to about the month before your projected wedding. I say month before since a lot of vendors will be requiring payments ahead of time and it gives a little wiggle room


I'm also an October 2023 bride(to be)!

Most weddings with 80-100 ppl cost anywhere from 16-20k for a modest wedding. A lot of ppl will try to cut corners by going with cheap cheap vendors and everything but you get what you pay for. Take your time and save. Also some expenses stay the same whether you have 10 or 100 guests like your photographer. Good luck!!

View Quoted Comment Hey there! Congrats! It's good to see someone with a similar idea of the wedding date idea lol. You brought up a very good point in the aspect that the venue will likely want their money upfront before they are booked ahead in advance. I also like that idea of estimating just how much we can save. Thank you for the suggestions!

View Quoted Comment I've definitely been keeping that in mind just in case. We are considering becoming homeowners as well so that mainly played a role in why we chose 2023 rathee than 2022

Sit down and figure out what your priorities are.

You can easily do $5k and have a nice wedding but you'll have get creative. Park department venue with restaurant corporate catering. Flowers and invites from Costco, cake from grocery store. Photographer on Instagram.

The costs for a wedding greatly vary depending on what type of wedding you want. how many people you plan on having, and location. Your guest count will have a huge impact on the cost for the wedding. Things like food and drinks are usually charged per person so the more guests you invite the more it is going to cost. A wedding in California tends to be more expensive than a wedding in Pennsylvania because everything is generally more in California. I will also add that $5,000 is a relatively low budget for a wedding. However, I definitely think it is doable to save money between now and your desired date.

The biggest determinants will be guest list size and location...high cost places like The east coast or California will be more expensive than the Midwest or rural south for example. And the more people you have the more expense of it gets due per head costs - small weddings of 15 to 30 have become popular partly for that reason

Congratulations Trevor! I think your date is smart. Long enough to save, plan and for covid to get under control (praying!). I was in a unique situation where we originally had an expensive wedding with 280 guests invited and replanned nearly everything due to covid and had a wonderful wedding of 104. I wish we had just kept it small from the beginning ❤️ Our expenses looked very different from the original in a good way 😂 one little saving tip is collecting all the old Bath & Body Works candles from relatives and putting white candles in them - no one can tell and they are high quality glass 😉

Costs are HIGHLY dependent on where you are.

Our low-budget NYC wedding was still around $30,000. Meanwhile, couples in the Midwest are able to have a similar event to ours for ... half or less.

Consider also things like:

Sample sale dresses

Fake flowers

No favors

No extras (photo booth, send off, etc)

Film/photography students for videography/photography

No decor/venue having a view/nice decor already

My fiancé and I have been going back and fourth on which year. We haven't put a hold on our venue yet we are waiting until their 2023 calendar is available but we are continuing to save as if we are going to have our wedding in 2022. Budget all depends on location, our budget was 15,000 but it seems almost impossible for the vision we. We are in the DC area so that makes a difference.

It depends on what your vision is, and how many guests you plan on having. You'd likely have to find a caterer without a food and beverage minimum, which can be tricky for weddings but can still be done. Other tips would be: buying a second-hand wedding dress, having a friend be your officiant, buying or renting your decor second-hand from Facebook marketplace, etc.

The cost is going to be dependent on so many things - guest count, ceremony/reception location, your vision, ability/willingness to DIY some things, friends who help out with certain things, etc. In my case, live and are getting married on the central coast of California. Cost of living is pretty high here and the average cost of a wedding for 100 people is about 30K. We'll be having a guest count of around 75 and have managed (thus far) to keep our budget around 10K. My parents are able to chip in 5K and we would have ideally liked to keep our costs no more than 6K simply because of the cost of living here. It ended up not being realistic so we had to shift our perspective. We got engaged October 2020 and are getting married April 2021, so we don't really have oodles of time to save up. We're basically just putting a little money aside each paycheck and paying for things as we can. We've both already filed our taxes and our returns will be going towards the wedding. With your wedding not being until October 2023, you have plenty of time to save up. Since you're already starting to plan, I'd definitely suggest figuring out the vision you have for your wedding soon. That way, you can slowly pick up some of the necessary things as you go. Want a really simple centerpiece of a single rose in a wine bottle with a few tea lights around it? Awesome. Every time you polish off a bottle of wine, clean and save the bottle. Tea lights can be found at dollar stores, so grab those whenever you've got a spare few dollars. Definitely make a solid plan for saving, though.

We are planning on somewhat similar # (tentative guest list has 125 but sure some people won't travel). We plan on $5k and should not have a problem, this includes hiring the band I play in. HOWEVER it will be heavily DIY and the band will be the biggest chunk of the budget. If we didn't have that it would be super easy to do under $5k. In large metro area.