This Bee's Budget

Ok Bees, I have a confession to make. I have no idea what our wedding budget is. Before we were engaged, you know, back when I was trying to figure out what was taking Mr Corn so long to decide I was the one for him, I tried to bribe him by suggesting we could hold a $5,000 wedding. He popped his eyebrow at me and remained quiet.

Once we were engaged we tried to realistically discuss our budget and I think the number $10,000 did come up at some point. Of course, prior to confirming that number we needed to figure out how many people we would be inviting. Originally, we both wanted something small, around 70 guests tops. But soon after getting engaged Mr Corn’s parents took us to a celebratory dinner and before I knew what had happened (and after a bottle of expensive champagne) we somehow had agreed to 120 guests!

Mr Corn and I live in the city of Boston and I attend church in Cambridge. It became apparent very quickly that hosting a wedding in Boston or the immediate area would be very cost prohibitive if we went with our initial desire to host a fun, inviting party for our family and friends so we started looking outside the city. We also thought, erroneously, that by having the wedding ceremony and reception outside we would save big bucks, but I can tell you that tents and rentals add up just as quickly as banquet fees and room rentals. So that didn’t help us save, either.

Finally, because we are a bit older and most of our friends are already married, we felt very strongly that we wanted to provide the best event that we could handle for the people in our lives who have supported us in so many ways throughout the years. But this didn’t solve the issue of figuring out exactly what the budget was.

Once the clambake option was finalized and we determined exactly how much the catering was going to cost, we built our budget around that. But instead of following the many budgets that you see on the Knot or in wedding magazines, we have just let it build itself; spending more in some areas and less in others. We still have a ballpark number in our head, and when it is all over we will sit down and figure out how much it all came out to be...but for us, at this time in our lives, it was more important to provide an event that really represented us.

With that said, I would like to point out that our not-really-having-a-budget does NOT mean that we are throwing all caution to the wind and ordering up everything we can think of. Mr Corn and I are fairly low key people (in our eyes…my sister will tell you otherwise ;)) so our non-budgeted wedding is going to come in significantly lower than a big budget, crazy-go-nuts wedding.

Anyway, once the dust has settled and the numbers finally come in, I have no issues with sharing with the Bee what it all works out to. For now, you will have to be satisfied with our ballpark number; $30K. If we were to take bets on this…I think we may end up coming in around $32.5K. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.