Budget seems to be kind of a hot topic on a lot of wedding sites. I have not had the snottiness on this site regarding budget, but I left another well-known wedding site a few years ago due to brides getting fairly nasty if you chose not to spend upwards of $15K to $20K on your wedding. I'm not, at all, judging people who spend way more than I would choose to on a wedding. They are just not my tribe, for lack of a better way of putting it. I'm looking for my people. 
Low budget brides...some questions.
1. What is your budget? Is it strict or flexible?
2. Why did you choose that budget?
3. What are you doing to save money on wedding expenses?
Our budget is $3K to $4K, We gave ourselves a range. We are comfortable spending $4K, but would like to keep it as close to $3K as we can. So, even though it is flexible in that way, we are pretty strict with not going over $4K. Our venue/food/drink takes up half of our budget.
We chose that budget because we're not getting married for 2 years yet and we can fairly easily save this amount of money without any huge changes to our current lives. We already live together. We're established. We have kids who will need fairly expensive things within the next few years. We don't want our wedding to be financial strain on us.
To save money on wedding expenses, we're keeping it small (under 50 people). We're doing the unthinkable and not hiring a professional photographer (a DJ was more important to us). We're getting our cake made at a grocery store bakery. My dress was less than $100. We're having our ceremony and reception in the same place.
