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Here is a breakdown of expenses that you can use as a guide. This takes an average of many wedding budgets and what percentage is typically spent on each category of product or service. To estimate how your costs might average out in this way, take your total dollar amount and multiply it by the percentage you are allotting to that item (5% is .05). This will give you a dollar amount to start with.

For example, let's say you have set $7,000 as a total budget amount. If you want to have a general idea of how to allocate that money, take each budget item and choose a percentage from the ranges given. To do this, you may want to first prioritize the items-decide which aspects of the wedding are most important to each of you, and which are least important. Once you have come to an agreement on this overall picture, you can "weight" the percentages to reflect your priorities.

Prioritized list:

So, for this example, the reception is most important, so I might choose to spend 45% of the budget on that, etc. When I went through a second time and allocated percentages to each item, I discovered that I had only allocated 88% of my total budget. I could go back through and increase the percentage allocated to some of the items, but instead, I will consider the extra 12% to be my "slush fund", and will allocate that money later when things shake down a little.

Let's turn this into dollars:

Now I can enter these amounts into the Budget Worksheet page, and have a printout to keep track of expenses. If I find, for example, a florist who can do my flowers for $650.00, I then know that I can afford to spend more on the food, or entertainment, etc.

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