How Our Wedding Budget Worked Out In The End

Money and our wedding budget has been a regular topic on this blog so now that it’s all done, I might as well give you a summary of how we did numbers-wise.

We were actually under the new budget though over the original one. The original number we were trying to work with was $20,000 but earlier this year we scrapped that and replaced it with a budget of $25,000. In the end we spend just over $23,000.

Now that last number doesn’t include all of our costs, just what Shawn and I paid for. Some items, like my dress and our live musicians, were paid for by my parents while Shawn’s family contributed some money towards our bar costs. Factoring in everything, we probably spent just under $27,000 which, for a downtown Toronto wedding with an open bar, isn’t crazy.

We could of though brought that number down a bit by making these two big changes:

1. The venue – We loved the Berkeley Church but it wasn’t cheap. In all, we spent about $15,000 there and while Shawn and I both agree it was well worth it, we definitely could have saved some money by using another venue.
   
   
2. Having an open bar – Again, this is something we wouldn’t have changed but if we had, we have saved ourselves well over $1000 (assuming of course we still paid for the dinner wine).

Tomorrow I’ll post an entry that looks at five areas where we’re happy we spent the money and five where we’re glad we saved it.