Don't Fall Into This Trap...

In my last post I mentioned how, if you’re having a $25,000 wedding and you have a year to plan for it, it you need to put aside about $2,000 a month to make sure that your wedding is a debt-free process. So how are you going to do that?

Well, in all honesty, you’re probably not going to be able to save that all of that amount and you likely will have a bit of wedding debt that, hopefully, you can pay off using the money that people give you as a gift. But don’t fall for the common belief that a wedding can pay for itself; this idea has trapped more than a few brides into years of debt.

Instead, count on between 10-20 percent of your wedding budget being reimbursed by your guests. What figure you go with depends on your wedding budget and your guest list. If your wedding is running you $25,000 and you’re inviting just over a 100 people who are, for the most part, gainfully employed, you’re probably safe to go with 20 percent.

But if you’re throwing some kind of lavish event and/or your guests have been hard hit by the recession (or maybe you’re throwing the sixth wedding they’ve been to this year), lower that figure to 10 percent.

Whatever you do, don’t do math like this:
100 guests X $200 = $20,000, meaning you only have to come up with $5,000

I know it’s tempting to imagine this scenario (or even better, one where you come out ahead) but don’t do it. If you do, you could find yourself in a nice, little debt-hole after you count up the checks and discover that those 100 guests were mostly couples/families who mostly gave stuff/best wishes/a group gift of an overpriced vacuum that you’ll never use.

So now that you’ve figured out how much you can allow as debt, how do you make up the difference?