A great man from my youth once said, ?Money can?t buy me happiness, but I?m happiest when I can buy what I want.? Most of us, of course, have budgets to follow when it comes to our weddings—we can?t always buy what we want.

But they look so happy? / Image via Giphy / Source: ABC/Happy Endings
It took the Horseshoes while to nail down our budget. We had to figure out a few things: How much did we want to spend" Were we being realistic" We then had to figure out how much we wanted to spend on each vendor/item once we had a rough number in our heads.

There are, of course, online templates that provide you with a good starting point. Most budget templates suggest that you allocate percentages of your overall budget toward specific aspects of your wedding. For example, 10% of your budget should go toward photography and video. This seems to be a fairly common suggestion across the board. I will say, now that our budget is 99% set, I have found that some of these suggested percentages were off. For example, most photographers we looked into were far more than 10% of our overall budget. We were also willing to spend a bit more on attire. My dress was admittedly a splurge, and Mr. Horseshoe wanted to buy himself a good suit and accessories that he could wear after our wedding.
How the Horseshoes set their budget:
We looked at our combined monthly net income and our existing life budget (including saving and spending habits). We determined how much we c...