You already know weddings are expensive. We don’t need to show you overwhelming amounts of data and statistics to prove our point. At Wedding for $1000, our goal is simple: to help you have the best possible wedding on the budget you can afford. Let’s start with Tip #1:

Tip #1 – Figure Out Your Real Budget

Your budget isn’t what you’d LIKE to spend, but what you actually CAN spend. If you’ve already got a set amount of cash in hand or a bank account dedicated to wedding spending, by all means, skip this part. But if you don’t yet have a firm idea of what your wedding may cost or who may be contributing to the budget, don’t plan anything until you find out those details.

Check out our free budget calculator!

Tip #2 – Figure Out What Matters Most

We have a fun, easy and argument-free way to figure out what wedding elements are most important to each of you:

Download the Wedding for $1000 Wedding Planning Checklist and follow the easy instructions!

Literally, it can’t get much easier than this exercise!

Tip #3 – Prioritize Wedding Spending

Did any of your Top Three Wedding Items Match?

If both of your Top Three Wedding Checklist items match, you are ahead of the game! You’ve got your priorities already set up. These three items are where you should spend the bulk of your wedding budget, regardless of what a traditional wedding budget says.

Did your Top Threes only match a couple of times or not at all? Read on.

If only a couple of your Top Three Wedding Checklist Items match, that’s totally fine.

The one or two that do match should go at the top of the list for where to spend your wedding budget. Then, spend a few minutes discussing the ones that don’t match and agree on the priority order they should go in. Now you should have a list of up to five items that you both really want to see included in your wedding.

If none of your individual Top Three Wedding Checklist Items matched, well, it’s not the end of the world. It’s time to have a conversation about what a wedding means to you and what is important on this big day. You’re going to have to work together to determine what elements are the highest priority in terms of spending the budget.

Once you know the most important elements of your wedding, take a few minutes to rank the rest of the checklist items you individually selected from highest to lowest priority. If you have room in the budget, this is the order in which you should spend money! This is the Would Be Nice part of the list and it’s important to know what comes next if you find yourself suddenly under budget or flush with cash.

Prioritizing Your Wedding Spending:  The Last Step

Make a new list with your Top Wedding Checklist Items at the top, and list the rest in priority order.

Now you have a handy guideline for wedding spending. If it’s not on the list, or it’s very low on the list, then you can’t spend money on it – until you and your fiancé reprioritize how you want to spend your wedding budget.

You may be wondering what to do about those items on the Wedding Budget Checklist that neither of you chose. What should you do with those? The answer: Absolutely nothing. You don’t love them, so you don’t need them!