The Budget Part I

So you’re officially engaged. You’ve told your family, your friends, updated your Facebook status and even picked up a couple of wedding magazines. Now you’re ready to start planning for the big day but where to start?

Well, that’s an easy question — start with figuring out your budget.

Why? Because your budget is going to dictate pretty much everything else: your guest list size, your venue, your decor, even possibly your date. And figuring out your budget early forces you to also figure out who’s paying for this wedding. True, that’s not a fun topic to explore but it’s better to sort it out now then $50,000 later, an amount that you assumed would largely be covered by your parents but turns out won’t be.

Coming up with that initial budget number is tricky, particularly if you only have a vague idea of what wedding things cost. So here, courtesy of our friends over at Wedding Bells magazine, is a breakdown of a few typical wedding costs, which they discovered through their 2008 survey:

* Reception venue = $7,063
* Bridal gown = $1,028
* Wedding bands = $1,489
* Photographer = $1,619
* Wedding cake = $327
* Florist/Decor = $865
(for the full survey results, go here)

Through their survey they also discovered that the average Canadian wedding costing $19,038 (hey, it’s better than in the US where the number’s at just under $29,000). Keep in mind that this number is a Canada-wide average, meaning it includes all the rural brides who get married in $500 Legions and have the ladies’ church group cater the dinner. For a Toronto wedding, you’re going to want to add in a few more thousand dollars to that amount.

You’re also going to want to add in more if you’re planning on having a big guest list (say around $120 a head) and if your dream day is one packed with course after course of food. For those weddings, I hope your parents are pitching in.

Of course deciding on a budget number and staying under that budget number are two very different things. We’ll talk more about both topics in the near future.