When it comes to budgeting, there is no better time to budget than when you are planning for a wedding. That’s because creating a wedding budget uses an event to budget around. That means it’s not a long term monthly process where you are constantly striving to improve it. Rather, it’s a one time event (hopefully) that you can rather easily create a budget for and then use the budget to help plan your wedding.
I recently wrote an article about budgeting for a wedding that talks about how to set your total budget and help you make the tradeoffs you need to make when doing so. Hopefully, you’ve got a target amount in mind so that when you are estimating your budget you’ll have someplace to start.
This article is addressing the actual wedding budget spreadsheet that you use to make your budget. We created a worksheet that you can use to add up and account for all of your expenses. The spreadsheet is very easy to use and if you’d like to watch a four minute video on how to use it you can watch this video. Below, we’ll give some brief instructions on how to use the sheet and a link to download it for free.
How to Use the Wedding Worksheet
The budget we provide is really pretty straightforward. If it doesn’t meet your exact needs, you can freely modify it. If you like it, we’d appreciate if you showed us some love with whatever social network you like, or leave us a comment below.
To start, download the spreadsheet file from the link below and open the spreadsheet. You can use any spreadsheet program such as Excel, OpenOffice or Google Docs to open the file. Once you open it, you’ll notice different colored cells. The yellow cells are meant to be the budget figures that you input. The blue cells are the expenses. These can easily be changed to whatever expenses you have.
Estimate and enter the expenses into the “budget” column. Start with rough estimates and as you get further in your planning, you can make better estimates. When you’ve filled in your estimates, you can look at the percent of total for each expense. Typically, the reception will be your biggest expense, except for maybe the cost of the rings.
As you start paying your actual expenses, fill them in on the “actual” column. As you do this, the difference between actual and budget will be calculated to the right. Also, there is a section for notes at the right that you can fill in anything that helps you calculate or plan your wedding.
It’s that easy. Now, for the link to download.
Download Our Family Budget Template
Here is where you can download the spreadsheet that we used in the video above. After downloading and using it, please leave us a comment below. We are always looking to improve these sheets.
To download, click on the button above and select “save as”. Then, download to your computer and open with any spreadsheet program. If you need a free spreadseet program, visit Open Office or you can use Google Docs.
We hope you enjoy using our free wedding budget download. Don’t forget to leave us a comment below.
