Friday, October 24, 2008

Wedding Budget Spreadsheet

Getting Started
So, to kick things off I found a wonderful Wedding Budget online at the Times-Standard web site. I decided to see just what a $10,000 wedding looks like. I created an online Google Doc with their numbers for a $10,000 and $15,000 wedding and set it up to automatically calculate just where we are as we start to plan. You can view the online version here and download your own Excel version here. Check it out!

All of this is simply to answer the first question, can we really host an elegant wedding for $10,000? It's a fine line between being rational and being too thrifty. I just have such a hard time rationalizing spending over $10,000 for a few hours of my life. That's two used cars, a down payment on a condo, a month in Europe, 10 months rent, and my favorite analogy from back in college, that's 10,000 Big Mickey's! (the best damn double cheeseburger on Earth, from Mickey's in Oak Park, IL).

So now that I got that off my chest, let's look seriously at whether this is even possible. As a couple who prides themselves on being at least semi-urbane, we shudder at the idea of hosting a poorly planned wedding, or even an informal one. Sure, I'd love to kick it in a pair of Chuck Tailors at my wedding with a big "cup cake" dress and call it a day, but past experience at low-key, quirky weddings has shown us that it's truly difficult to balance a casual playfulness with the real gravity a wedding should have. I'm sure the next few months will show us just how difficult that will be.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

And So It Starts

I suppose in this day in age, your first blog entry is a momentous occasion. And what better inspiration for such as a wedding. Mark and I just became engaged after seven near flawless years of dating and are taking our first baby steps in planing our wedding. I'm hoping this space becomes a virtual scrapbook of all of the amazing ideas to be gathered online, and I'm sure, a small tool for sanity in sharing our process with others. Enjoy!