3 Steps to Save For Your Dream Wedding (+tips from a wedding planner)

To get a better idea of how couples can save for their dream wedding, we talked to wedding planner Sarah Glick. She co-owns Brilliant Event Planning along with Chelsea LaFollette. For years, the two have been planning weddings all around the world so they’ve personally handled their fair share of expensive weddings.

The budgets for our clients really vary, depending on headcount and location, but we have planned weddings for clients with budgets exceeding $1 million, Sarah says.

Whether you want to save for a wedding of $35,329 or $1 million, all you need to do is follow a system of three steps:

1. Set a realistic budget
2. Prioritize the important things
3. Use sub-savings accounts to help you save

Step 1: Set a realistic budget

Even though you’re on a personal finance site like IWT, you’re still human. That means that your wedding will most likely be much pricier than you originally thought. The best way to not fall into debt when the day you sign a check to vendors arrives is to anticipate and plan for it.

Set a budget, Sarah says. People often think they can just handle each contract with a vendor as it comes up and deal with the costs on a case-by-case basis. However, that often results in the client spending way more than they wanted to spend and more than they would have spent had they considered the overall big picture from the beginning of the planning process.

So sit down and make a realistic budget of how much your wedding might be priced. The back-of-a-napkin formula for it is simple too. Simply take into account:

1. The average age at marriage, which is about 31 for men and 29 for women.
2. The average wedding cost, which is about $35,000.

If you’re 21, you should each plan to save around $3,500 a year or $292 a month.

And if you think that’s unreasonable, I have two things to tell you:

1. Even if you cant save that much now, any amount you CAN save will add up down the road. Can you afford $50/month? If so, that’s $50 better than you were doing yesterday.
2. If you work towards earning more money, you’ll be able to eventually save this much. Keep reading and Ill give you the exact resources you can use to get there.

Of course, this will change depending on how old you are and how much you want to spend on your wedding. Here’s a great wedding cost calculator you can use to give you a rough estimate of how much you should save based on what you want for your big day.

Step 2: Prioritize the important things

If your budget seems a little bit intimidating and you want to find areas to save, don’t worry. You can always prioritize aspects of your wedding to help you cut back.

This depends on what the couples priorities are. Everyone is a little bit different, Sarah explains. Couples can save by choosing one or two areas to splurge on and then being cost-conscious for everything else.

It’s human nature to want the best for our wedding day, and we need to be realistic about that. However, you also need to be realistic about the fact that you cant always have the best of everything. That’s where prioritization comes in.

From Sarah:

Remember how I mentioned that location can affect how expensive weddings are? You can leverage this fact and cut back on your wedding expenses by choosing a more budget-friendly location.

A wedding in Mississippi, for example, will cost much less than a wedding in New York City, even if the headcount stays the same, Sarah says.

Once you know what your priorities are, revisit your projected wedding budget and reconsider some areas where you can cut back. If you have the costs on paper, you’ll know exactly which trade-offs you can make to keep within your budget. If you haven’t decided on what you want to spend though, itll look like there are no trade-offs necessary.

THAT’S how people get into debt for their wedding.

But I’m not going to let that happen to you. That’s why I’m going to show you how to set up a sub-savings account where you can put money away for your wedding automatically each month.

Step 3: Use sub-saving accounts to help you save

Let’s assume you’re 25 years old and plan to spend $40,000 on your wedding. Lets say you also plan on getting married by the time you’re 30.

If you want to pay for the whole wedding yourself (a totally achievable goal), you’ll have to save about $8,000 a year or $666 a month for the wedding (lets not read too much into that last number).

A perfect way to put away that evil amount each month is through a sub-savings account. This is a savings account you create in addition to your regular savings. Often times, you can even name them too!

You can leverage your sub-savings account to:

1. Put money away towards specific savings goals
2. Save cash when you automate your finances

The beauty about them is that they allow you to see exactly how much you’ve saved because the account is tailored for that specific goal. This does wonders for you psychologically.

When I first discovered sub-savings accounts, I created one and named it Down Payment for a down payment on a house. I was regularly transferring money into it based on my savings goals using my automated finances.

As the months passed, the amount in that account grew bigger and bigger, and I felt really proud of my accomplishment.

During this time, one of my friends was just blindly putting away money in an account he had mentally earmarked for vague goals.

Though we might have had the same amount saved away, the difference between us psychologically was staggering. Where he felt despair about trying to save money, I was motivated.

For me, I wasn’t working towards $20,000 for a down payment. I was working on saving $333 a month over five years a perfectly achievable goal, especially after I tracked my progress.

So go to your bank’s website and open up a sub-savings account and name it Wedding fund. Once you’ve done that, you can now automate your finances so you’re putting money into it each month automatically.

Check out my video below to learn exactly how to open up a sub-savings account today.