Budgeting

Blog post by Wei Jien:

Before Sue Lynn and I started our wedding blog, my friends and colleagues always asked me, "How are the wedding preparations going?" I will always answer them the same thing -- "Okay-lah." This time around, they started making comments such as, "Seems like your wedding preparations are going well. We can't wait to attend it." It was the wedding blog they were keeping tabs on.

Like a business everything you do needs to be budgeted. Coming from an accounting and finance background, it was understood that I would handle the budget planning. From my last post "concept", I worked out our wedding budget. Once we had our wedding concept sorted out, we roughly knew what we wanted/needed to have in our wedding. From there on, we gathered as much information as we could to prepare the budget. In our case, it was a joint effort of the wedding planner and us.

After obtaining all the information needed, our wedding planner laid them on an excel sheet for easy-viewing. For me, preparing a budget was a piece of cake, but it's the "other forces” that were hard to fight. When we saw the budget total amount, both my fiancé and I tried cutting the expenses from top to bottom and most of the time it was by half!

The "other forces” I speak off in our case are our parents and the wedding planner. Whether you like it or not, these people will usually insist on including this and that, which will make the wedding at the end of the day, cost a bomb. We had 2 options to deal with this. First was to ignore all the wedding planner’s suggestions and keep both our parents in the dark with regards to the wedding. Second option was to ELOPE!!!

The first option would be the easiest way out, but what's the point of hiring a wedding planner if you are going to ignore all his/her suggestions? And somehow, you can never keep your parents in the dark especially when you come from a Chinese family. Also, eloping was never an option…however tempting it may be!

In the end, none of the options were ideal. We compromised, but the key here is achieving BALANCE. We accepted 50% of our wedding planner’s suggestions and 50% of our parents’ suggestion. Like it or not, a wedding planner is more experienced in this field, having planned hundreds of weddings. He/she would know the wedding protocols and what should be included in the wedding. And since our parents often have better insight, they will have some valuable feedbacks which we could learn from, based on their own wedding experience.

A budget is often easy to prepare but do expect your final budget to be different (often more expensive) compared to the initial version. Other forces can be a pain to deal with and might even put a strain on your budgeting. It might not be the wedding planner or the parents who cause this strain. The problem might be caused by the couple's friends/acquaintance, or it could even be due to poor economy (high inflation or recession). Whatever the factors may be, just remember that is the key to good budgeting is BALANCE.