DC Wedding Planning - Have A Contingency Budget

When planning your DC Wedding, the wedding budget is nearly always a factor in every decision that you’ll make. An additional challenge is that if you are like most couples, the is the first DC Wedding you’ve ever planned so you likely don’t know the costs and variables.

As an award-winning wedding DJ in Washington DC, our DC Wedding Blog is designed to help not only those couples who are planning their DC Wedding but anyone who might be looking for answers to their particular event planning problem.

This article is one in a series of articles that answers the Top 50 Wedding Questions couples have when planning their wedding. If you’d like to see more articles in this series click here to be taken to our main blog page.

How much contingency do I need in my wedding budget?

Lots of couples have no idea how much a wedding costs, which is only natural if you haven't planned a big event, done any research, or chatted frankly about it with married friends.

If you know your parents want to contribute to your wedding, try to have the money conversation with them early on. That way, you’ll know how much you have to work with, and if they want their money to cover specific items (like your dress or the wine, for example), or if there are any other caveats to them contributing.

Traditionally the parents of the couple covered virtually the entire cost of the wedding.

Now, however, more and more couples are getting married later and have often are far more established in terms of their career. The more common wedding budget has the couple paying for one-third of the cost with the parents splitting the balance.

Shave 12.5% off your total budget

Once you've decided how much you can afford to spend on your DC wedding, no matter how great or small that figure is, shave a hefty contingency off it.

12.5% is a good amount, but if you know you tend to overspend, 15% might be savvier, or if you're good at sticking to budgets and chasing down deals, 10% might do the trick.

If you've decided you have $30,000 total to spend on your wedding, from now on pretend you have $26,250 and plan accordingly with that as your new working budget - that way, the money is there as a back-up for any unexpected costs (or if your dream dress happens to be $500 over-budget!).