A big pet peeve of mine when scrolling the wedding blogs on Pinterest is seeing all these charts and infographics that tell you exactly what percentage of your wedding budget needs to go to which aspects of your big day.

What these wedding blogs don’t take into account is if you really don’t care about flowers or fancy food but you want an insane dress and incredible photography and videography (just for example).

From what we know about our couples and their overall wedding budgets, it’s fair to say that a good amount spend approximately 12% of their wedding budget hiring us for their day (as recommended by many blogs and planners). However, we have couples that DIY everything, have a backyard wedding, get an off the rack dress, have a friend make the cake, family members make the food, etc. etc. because they care about photo and video the most. This means that their photo team can be 30-50% of their entire wedding budget. And there’s nothing wrong with that!

That’s not to say this only applies to photo and video. Our wedding planner friends have told us of couples they worked with who had massive budgets but went big on the food, dress, and venue and went more budget friendly on their photographer!
You can guess what my priority would be if we could do our wedding over again (hint… it’s photography, obviously). But no one, i repeat NO ONE can tell you and your fiance what your priorities are for your wedding day!

How to Budget for Your Priorities

My advice: sit down with your fiance and think about if you could only spend money on THREE aspects of your wedding day, which would you choose? This helps you to really identify what your unique priorities are. This is where you know to invest most of your budget and let the rest fall into place.

Budgeting is hard, especially for your wedding day. No one can do it for you but I hope these words were encouraging to you as you navigate arguably one of the hardest parts of engagement.

If you’re one of our clients, know that we are always in your corner and ready to answer as many questions as we can, photography related or not.

Want to be one of our clients? Head to the contact page and fill out a connect form and we’ll be in touch soon!