Getting married soon, or planning out a wedding years out? In this post, I’ll show you how much an average wedding costs and how you can save for a wedding by planning ahead.

The main caveat of this article is time.

If you only have $500 saved up and want to get married next week, this article won’t help you. The reason’s because saving money takes time, and without time you won’t be able to save enough money for a wedding.

There’s one exception which is if you’d just like to get married fast and dirty, you can get married in Vegas for about $400.

But if you’d like a decent wedding, read the rest of the article.

How Much Does A Wedding Cost

Wedding costs vary by geography. Wildly.

For example, the cheapest is to get married would be in Arkansas for around $12K average.

Nationally, the wedding average is about $20K.

In more expensive areas in the nation, the average wedding cost will run $30K.

Of course, if you’d like to go ultra-extravagant, you can easily run up a bill to the low-to-mid 6 figures for your wedding.

Cutting Wedding Costs So You Don’t Have To Save As Much

One of the easiest ways on how you can save for a wedding is to make the wedding cost less. Obviously, if your wedding costs less, you need to save less money.

So let’s talk about some variables in a wedding where you can save some costs. And I want you to view your wedding as a set of levers that you can tweak to save money on.

Maybe some things in your wedding can save you a ton of money, but it’s a non-negotiable. That’s OK, keep that expense.

But if some things are just expensive and not useful, then don’t feel obligated to pay for it!

This is the whole Pareto’s principle where if you get rid of the lowest 20% priority items, you can save 80% of your maximum possible savings.

First, if you choose your location carefully, you may be able to get a lot more bang out of your buck. Instead of getting married in NYC, you might pick somewhere else that’s respectable, like Houston or something and save $6K on average.

Second, do you really want booze at your wedding? To be honest, I’d recommend no booze, or very little booze. Booze is very expensive. Sure, it might not be “fun” without alcohol (if your friends/family are alcoholics). But keep in mind that alcohol leads to bad behavior = higher chance of creating bad memories for your wedding. Some people will starting drinking and can’t handle it. After their 3^rd drink, they’ll all of a sudden think your wedding is all about them. Essentially, paying for alcohol is like paying more for an increased chance of having your wedding ruined. Bad investment in my opinion. Your opinion might differ. But if you insist on alcohol on your wedding, at least do cash bar instead of open bar to save on costs and limit bad behavior (the cheapest people are the least grateful and the most angry).

Third, the most expensive thing for weddings is venue and catering. These 2 things are huge levers and as such you could save tons if you picked a slightly more modest venue, and have your catering be a little bit less aggressive.

• There are some tradeoffs here you can do. Perhaps the catering is more important than the venue or vice versa. Think about if you’re willing to do a cheaper venue for bomb ass catering, or if you can do mediocore catering for a little bit better venue.

Fourth, consider arbitraging labor by outsourcing it.

• As an example, you can be creative and hire a photographer from a 3^rd world country that speaks English (i.e. Philipines, India) and fly them over. You can then compare costs of flight + 3^rd world labor and see if it’s much cheaper than domestic labor. A concrete example is a wedding photographer. Domestic photographers could cost up to $10K. But one you “import” from the Philipines can maybe only cost you $1K. Plus their round-trip flight of maybe $2-$3K.
• Another example is your invitation design. You can have folks in the Philipines or India design it for you instead of having it done domestically. And in fact, there’s a lot of super cheap designs on Etsy as well.

Lastly, consider some combination of DIY.

• From invitations to decorations, you can DIY some stuff to save on costs. As an example, you might hire out 50% of the décor to save time, but decorate the other 50% yourself to save money.

Feel free to combine the above tactics in a way that works for you. It’s all about tradeoffs: you spend less in one area, so you can spend more in another. Just know what’s important for you and your spouse, and what’s not important so you know where to eliminate costs, and where to splurge.

If you want to save for a wedding, you’ll be basic saving towards a finish line. Everyday you save money, you get that much closer to your finish line. By using the tactics above, you pull the finish line closer to you and will be able to save for your wedding faster.

How To Save For A Wedding

Now that you’ve got a rough estimate in mind from previous section, go ahead and create a wedding savings account. A “wedding savings account” is just a savings account whose funds are dedicated to pay for your wedding.

I recommend using ally.com because their savings rates is one of the highest out there. This helps you explicitly separate out your savings for your wedding so you know how far along you are.

• This will psychologically encourage you because you’ll always be able to see your progress over time.
• This also prevents you from accidentally dipping and/or commingling your wedding money with your regular expenses.

Next, calculate how much income you make and how much expenses you have each month. This is the maximum amount of money you can save each month for your wedding.

Each month, you’ll allocate some money (that makes sense to you) to your savings account. I recommend using auto-transfer each month from your checking account to your wedding savings account so you don’t forget. This automated transfer also takes out any emotion you might have transferring the money manually.

• Example: if you and your fiancé are planning for a $30K wedding, and you both deploy methods to save an extra $1k/mo each, ($2k/mo total), it’ll take 15 months to save up for the wedding. Planning a wedding takes a while anyway, so the 15 months can be overlapped with your planning.

If you’d like to save for your wedding faster, as opposed to just hacking your wedding so there’s less to save in the first place, check these posts out:

• Saving on utilites.
• Save a ton of money on coffee by making it at home.
• Don’t buy any luxury goods until well after your wedding.
• Save money on food without having to cook.
• Save even money on food by eating in. And then save even more with these grocery hacks.
• Delay buying a house. It’s not an investment.

The more you save, the faster you hit your savings goal. While each article above might only save you a little bit each month, when combined they can save you tons every month.

The Most Important Thing

The most important thing is to plan ahead of time so the money doesn’t add to the anxiety that comes with a wedding. If you know how much money you need for the wedding and are saving towards it each month, you’re already 100% confident you’ll be able to afford it without issue.

All you need to do to save for a wedding boils down to simple math and combining it with the tactics above.

Keep in mind the more extravagant your wedding:

• The longer it’ll take you to save up for it, OR
• You’ll need to save extremely aggressively for it.
• Or a combination of both.

However, weddings are ultimately a very personal thing and you ought to have the wedding that makes the most sense to you and your values. Only thing I’d ask you to keep in mind is:

• Be realistic with the math. If you want no compromises in your wedding, you might need to suffer a lot now to save money and/or get married later (or borrow a bunch of money).
• If getting married fast is a priority, then you might need to downgrade the “lower priority” stuff for your wedding to save costs.
• Attack your savings goal one step at a time, and before you know it, the big day will arrive and you’ll enjoy one of the most memorable days in your life without the financial anxiety.

Source for wedding averages: https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-cost-of-wedding