As happy as you will be at the wedding, you or your parents (if they spent for the wedding) will be twice as unhappy if you ended up spending more than you expected for the entire wedding. This is what usually happens if you keep on spending as it comes during the wedding planning stage. Therefore it is extremely important to plan ahead and budget your wedding expenses correctly.

So get everyone who is involved in the spending to sit down. Get a book or a file and start to organize things properly. Decide on a full amount you are ready or can afford to spend for the entire wedding and start budgeting. Shown below is a rough guideline of how a wedding budget is allocated to different aspects of the wedding.

Of course, yours can vary! Perhaps you might want to spend more on one the aspects over another. For e.g. if you need to add 2% more for the honeymoon over photography, you can change the plan to allocate 12% for the honeymoon and 8% for photography. Therefore you can easily customize your budget according your liking.

So how do you calculate? Simple! Multiply your total wedding budget by the percentage value. For e.g. if you total wedding budget is LKR 100,000.00, then multiply it by 10 (for photography) and divide the entire amount by 100. There! You have the amount you need to allocate for photography.

Here's the average budget allocation:
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