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.