Friday, December 16th, 2011 by John Scrofano

How to Use the OneWed Wedding Budget Worksheet

Ready to start conquering your wedding budget?  Follow our approach and use our spreadsheet and you'll find it easier than you thought.  You may even enjoy it.

We built the wedding budget planner using Google Spreadsheets because you can start using it in one click, with no software to install, it saves to your Google account, and you can share it with anyone.

To get started, here is the spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet is an exhaustive list of different places you could spend your wedding budget.  The purpose of "Priority Based" budgeting is to help you and your soon-to-be discuss what elements are most important.  Then you budget around the important items.  If you use traditional wedding budget techniques (just looking at averages), you wind up with not enough money for the things that really matter and spending money on things you won't remember.

 

The step by step process to get you started: 

 

  1. 1.  Open the spreadsheet in new browser window
  2. 2.  Enter your total wedding budget (or best guess) into cell D6
  3. 3.  Now, forget about money all together for a minute.  Go through the different sections of the spreadsheet and assign a priority in terms of how important it is to you.  Put a 1,2, or 3 in the blue Priority column of each row.  Have your soon-to-be go through and do the same.  Then TALK through where and why your priorities are different.  Keep in mind that both of you will likely have changing priorities over the course of planning.  Talking through your priorities early on is also great practice for marriage smile
  4. 4.  Start putting numbers into the "Budgeted" column by each item.  
  5. 5.  Revise and rework your numbers until you get to something you both feel good about.

 

The "Ceremony" section is filled in as an example, replace the values with your won.  As you are completing the worksheet, you will see the "Honesty Checker" section in the top right summing all your inputs. This is a quick way to see how and where you are spending your money by priority, and where you are compared to your budget.