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Getting married is an exciting time but it requires a lot of planning. Before the wedding, you will need to lodge a notice of intended marriage and decide on the type of ceremony you will have and where you will be married. Of course getting married is not just about the wedding day, but it may be one of the first big expenses you will encounter as a couple. While parents of both the bride and groom will often chip in to cover some of the wedding costs, many people are marrying later and have a good income of their own.
If you are paying for your wedding yourself, you also tend to have a bit more freedom when it comes to choosing everything from venues to flowers to menus. If your parents - or your in-laws - are footing the bill, you might feel obliged to listen to their opinions. Establish a budget, and put a savings plan in place - a fee free, high interest savings account is ideal, where you can deposit a regular amount weekly or monthly.
You can work out in advance how much you can afford to set aside, which will help you work out the final budget for the wedding itself. The last thing you want is to start married life with an enormous debt.
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How much does a typical wedding cost?
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Weddings, even small ones, are expensive. Laura and Vincent, a couple in their early 30s, planned a very modest affair - a rooftop wedding with about 50 guests, finger food, a few tables and chairs, flowers, casual wedding clothes. Even so, with a couple of nights at a hotel and a week away at a beach cabin, the whole wedding cost about $10,000. 'Because we had the wedding at home, we actually had to vacate our apartment the night before,' Laura says, 'so we'd have somewhere to get dressed. That was for two nights, a cost we hadn't factored in.'
Clothes for the bride and groom came to $2500; the wedding ring, 'the tiniest pink diamond', was around $1200; the celebrant cost $550.There are plenty of temptations when it comes to decorating venues, catering, and of course the dress alone can cost anything from $100 to tens of thousands.Laura recommends getting a professional party planner and giving them a definite budget, which you will need to monitor to guard against blow-out.
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'We had enormous trouble keeping the party planner to his quote,' she says. 'We were always going through all expenses he had put forward, saying, we don't need that, we can do without that. 'It was surprising how stressful the whole thing was. The week leading up to it no fun, with the party planner constantly on the phone checking every last detail, because it's your wedding and they want to be sure.’
'On the day it all worked out really well, but the whole thing cost about three times as much as we thought it would.
Getting married in Australia
The Attorney-General's Department provides information related to getting married in Australia.
http://www.ag.gov.au/www/agd/agd.nsf/Page/MarriageGetting_Married
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