HUGE Wedding Budget MYTH 

J: "no one wants to talk about statistics" Me: "hey! I do!" J: "unless youre a statistician" Me: "oh.. carry on"

I spent the last two years taking classes for being a florist just to do my daughters wedding. Originally cost over 8,000 for florals and by being the florist for her wedding I am spending 2,500 and getting everything she wanted including 8 foot tall tree centerpieces/ full aisle florals/ beautiful circle arbor/ tons of greenery touches. A little time small investments business License and finding wholesalers helped me save over $5000

I just had a wedding for 200 people for about $13,000 and it was beautiful! I used so many of the tips and tricks from Jamie and wouldn’t have been able to do it without her😍

You really drilled the "invitations and paper are a waste of money," so they're low on our priority list now!!

I think the hardest part of budget weddings is the sticker shock. Like you plan to spend 5k on your wedding, and think that's modest but comfortable, only to find out that a decent wedding photographer alone costs half that. I mean, just look at this video's statistics -- a photographer, dj, wedding coordinator, florist combined is about 70% of a 10k budget. I was so upset when I started planning to find out that 10k was considered a "super budget" wedding.

THANK YOU Jamie for speaking on this topic and showing that we aren’t alone and that these 30k+ weddings are not the norm or even the standard!! I live in a destination wedding area and I had a wedding planner tell me to my face that if we didn’t have at least 30k our wedding wasn’t happening.. that was really discouraging to hear. Your videos have helped in so many ways and we’ve had to get really creative to stick to our 15k wedding for 80 ppl. A longer engagement, lots of DIY and some cut corners, have kept us on track. Thank you for all your tips and tricks!!

I made our invitations on the computer and printed them at the local print shop. It was SO MUCH CHEAPER than doing it any other way and they look gorgeous, and they're 100% unique. So happy with them!

My mother in law made all our floral decorations herself with flowers from her garden. Literally not a single flower was bought, she just asked some people she knew if she could cut some flowers from their garden. It was the perfect way to do it, because she always wants to help and give her opinion, and I didn't have strong opinions about florals so she could do whatever she had in mind. The result was beautiful!

as a person 9 months out from her wedding this is the content that i NEEDED! i’m only spending 5k and i never see this represented online! your whole channel is a godsend

Save the dates and invitations can get so expensive! We waited for The Knot to have a stationery sale to order, bought a roll of self adhesive magnets and turned the Save the Dates into fridge magnets! All for about 80 cents per invite. I'm also a cricut girl, so I used cricut pens to address all of the envelopes and the machine to cut gatefold invitation holders Just some ideas for others 😉!

In the future, if you could make sure there is enough contrast on the images to make them easy to read, that would be great! The white numbers on the light pastel background were a bit challenging to read. Just a friendly suggestion :-)

I am getting married on September 25th to my childhood sweetheart and Jamie (with her videos) are the reason why this wedding came together and why I was able to be my own wedding planner (because I couldn’t afford one). I am so grateful for this woman, her advice and tactics are absolute gold! She has saved me from severe stress and serious family drama throughout this process. Thank you Jamie, you’re flipping amazing! I recommend her to all of my newly engaged women in my life to watch her. Listen to this woman y’all!

We need some groom and groom wedding tips. How are the ceremonies different? I know we can do whatever we want, but it’s really helpful to have default settings to fall back on.

Not only DIYing but thrifting is awesome. There’s so many things brides buy at full price and only use once then sell for less than half price or more!! And it’s the exact same thing you would of bought yourself and then threw away too!!

I’m planning a super intimate, small backyard wedding & my entire budget is $2k. But I already have a venue through my parents (their beautiful mountainous backyard), wearing my moms dress, using Spotify for music, and my brother will be taking pictures. A sweet family friend is doing all my flowers and paying for them ❤️ The majority of my budget is food and decorations. But I’m a DIY queen and love crafting so it’ll be so easy. I’m super excited and proud of my budget. Like whaaaat? It blows my mind on how much weddings cost. I feel so lucky to have so many things taken care of for me budget wise

Jamie's reaction to the 92% didn't hire a professional invitation designer killed me! 😂😂😂 My invitations were my FAVORITE diy and I did my design off of one of Jamie's older diy videos.

I'd love for you to guess the cost of most wedding decor pieces ( like 1 centerpies, backdrop, extra lighting, etc.) from photos of them.

There was another lady who I think is a wedding planner also, on RU-vid who I checked out. She literally said the average price for a wedding is upwards of 100k you can only imagine how the comments went most were like I only have 15, 20 or 30k at most. You could tell people were disappointed and felt like they couldn’t have a wonderful day because they didn’t spend 100k

The average is always listed, but rarely the median, which often the average includes outliers that throw it off a lot. The median is closer to 15k from what I have seen

I just used Canva (free design software) for my save the dates, used black font and printed on shimmer paper from Michael’s, everyone loved them! Super cheap and easy DIY. Also Jamie your hair looks gorgeous!

I really appreciate this kind of content. When planning the budget for say my dress I kept worrying that we didn’t allocate enough because of shows like say yes to the dress that make you think if you don’t have $10,000 to put towards a dress you won’t find something. Turns out basically all the options I liked were well within my budget and I did have enough to get something great. It’s so true if you’re getting high quotes in one category it can be worth hunting around to find something that fits your budget because chances are something will!

I wanted to stick my budget around 12-15k. The problem was that everywhere around here for venues and catering were ranging $50 a head. Which maybe could be fine if my fiancé and I didn't have such large families (my dad alone has 7 siblings, his dad I think is the youngest out of 9). The first venue we found that we truly loved and was reasonable with the food and pop bar was $23 a head. That was awesome. Whoever was able to do it under 10k, BLESS YOU MY CHILD!

Woah, I’m part of the 26% because I want to spend, at most is $8k. I don’t think I can justify myself, personally, spending over $10k. I just know what I can genuinely afford and I feel like going over makes me feel so guilty.

Wow, this is the video I needed. So assuring to have a sense of what average people are finding for these costs. Thanks so much, planners rarely take the time to do this. Can you make this a series where you poll folks from various major cities? That’d be cool!

I answered most of these questions when she posed them on her Instagram and one thing I was confused about was how to price an all inclusive venue. we're paying our venue (which includes food/drink/space) per head that show up and just have to meet the minimum. so the cost isn't only towards the venue, it's towards a couple things.

I thought I wanted to spend $30k on out wedding. The when we actually began planning a wedding in earnest during the pandemic, I realized it really wasn't worth the stress and we were really spending to please others. I wanted a "normal wedding" like what our friends and other family members have/had, and just assumed we wanted the same as everyone else we knew did for their wedding. But we realized we had better use for the money and didnt want a big wedding anyway. Moral of the story, don't assume you have to plan a big, expensive wedding. $30k is a lot of money and you should spend it on a wedding only if you AND your fiance want to.

Transportation - I absolutely did not want travel between the ceremony and reception. We picked a venue that could do both at the same place. Both the bridal party and the groomsmen got ready at the venue too. I have hated traveling between the ceremony and reception. Very happy that we had a wedding where we didn't have to do that

Would love to see more floral DIY. Also loved the dessert table tutorial you did recently, that basically saved my sanity :)

I really enjoyed this video! I kept having to pause the video to view the stats though since they weren't on the screen for long. If you keep them on the screen longer next time that would be awesome. 😄

This video makes so much sense! Like everyone else I’ve been hearing $30k most of my life, but most weddings I’ve been to have been under $30k other than maybe 1 or 2.

Food and cake and alcohol is very important

We spent 2000.00 for our whole wedding. It was wonderful.

i love the idea of diy invites and maybe a mix of real and fake flowers for bouquets and center pieces.

I actually do have the "average" wedding budget but have used so many of your tips to DIY and save money. All the saved money went to our venue which is a castle and a hiring a rock band that I really like. Those were my priorities. With that being said, I'd personally very much enjoy watching a video about bands, but maybe that's just me 😂

We had our dream wedding this summer for under 30k$ without compromising anything. We did almost no DIY, we had a wedding planner, a videographer, hair and makeup artists for the whole wedding party, lots of florals, we both wore two amazing outfits and we even had a live band for the ceremony and cocktail. I don't think you should have to settle between compromising your vision and busting your budget. If your priorities are clear you will naturally save money on the things you don't care about and spoil yourself on the things that are really important to you. Take decisions according to what is important for you. Don't feel pressured to do things in a certain way just because that is how things are done. I hope all of you can make your dream wedding happen :)

This makes me wonder why as a wedding vendor, and a bride, why I even follow the Knot on social media since most weddings don’t even look like those weddings…

"No one wants to see this kind of content." Jamie, you highly underestimate my love of statistics and spreadsheets :)

your intuition about the mean is correct! medians are typically reported for skewed data (which budgets DEFINITELY are!). that's also why housing prices are reported with medians. it better captures what realistic numbers are.

Jamie can we pretty please do some diy floral-less centrepieces? I had some ideas but you always come up with some amazing things I need ideas of centrepiece ideas that have NO FLOWERS

I feel like the amount of money u spend also depends on where u live as well and or having ur wedding

Median. Do the median. :)

So my venue ended up being just under $13,000. But that included the venue itself, tables, chairs, linens, catering, bakery, and open bar with beer, wine, and liquor. So the vast majority of my wedding was $13,000. I got my dress for $100 (for an $1800 dress) from a place going out of business. I DIYed all my decor including flowers i made from coffee filters. My bridesmaids and i did our own makeup and a family friend did our hair as a gift. I spent $1800 on my photographer and only $1000 for the DJ. A few things to note: i got married in Northeast Philly, in January, before covid.

Please more floral DYI's because most weddings I have been in and my wedding next year, we make our own bouquets from fake flowers. I will be making mine out of flowers made from book pages.

This type of data is so helpful. So glad you made this.

I've arranged flowers for friends' weddings and the cost is around $500-$1000 depending on what you want done. It's mostly just the cost of the flowers: cheaper flowers mean lower costs; and, bulk flower orders/discounts are definitely your friend. For labor, I meet with whoever is available the day (or a couple days) before the wedding to do the work. It could be the bride/groom's family members/friends, guests from out of town, or even the wedding party. I then show them the technique of how to create a bouquet. It's great because everyone gets to work together and get to know each side of the family better. Everything is done in a couple of hours (3 hours tops) and everyone learns a new skill. For one wedding I helped out at, the bridesmaids arranged their own bouquets and I just tied them off with floral tape and a ribbon. The main issue with DIY flowers is the space. If it's a spring/summer wedding, you will definitely need a refrigerator handy to store the flowers up to 2 days before the wedding. If a fall/winter wedding, it may be harder to get specific flowers in (if you're picky), but, you can leave them out in a cool room (basement) without fear of all the flowers wilting/going bad. The worst case scenario flower DIY hack (ex. if your flower order didn't show up) would be to buy cut flower bouquets from a grocery store (ex. Walmart, Safeway, Costco, etc) and rearrange the bouquets into wedding bouquets. I've done this for a very small wedding party (4 people: bride, groom, maid of honor, and best man only): I bought a $30 bouquet from a grocery store, made the bride's bouquet, a corsage for the maid of honor and used the scraps to make small floral pins for the groom and best man. If you really want to save on flowers, though, don't have floral centerpieces. Weddings with no floral centerpieces can spend less than $500 on flowers. I think that dollar store lanterns and electronic tea lights look simple and elegant as centerpieces. Another creative option I've seen is having a snack station as the centerpieces: plates/tea cups/cups/bowls are arranged artistically in the center of the table while holding different snack foods (ex. Nuts, chips, candy, chocolate, etc.) Basically, the containers/plates/cups are borrowed and labeled on the bottom for easy return. The plates/cups/bowls don't have to match for this to work which is why I really like this this DIY hack. Also, the guests have something to munch on as they wait for the reception to start. Another wedding I went to just had the chilled bottles of wine which were going to be served, the wine glasses (rented and included with the catering company), and some ribbon arranged beautifully on the table as the centerpieces. It also saved time on the clean up as the attendants took the empty glasses and bottles away as the night progressed. I feel that as long as you use what/who you have, use creative solutions, and make some concessions on your vision, saving money on the wedding is not impossible.

Doing RSVP online for my invitations 😊

Yes to videos on DIY florals and invitations please!!

I had a backyard wedding and it was very pricey to get all the rentals and vendors. 😬 We’re talking 40k for 130 people.

Love the new hairdo! Gives you a 70s vibe😍

I love statistics! And I am not in that field, lol. Thank you for this video

I voted on this as well, and as someone who's getting married in Scotland, we're having a ceilidh band (no DJ for us!) so I guess for your numbers that's more of a cultural difference. But really fab video and a relief to see more realistic numbers for lower budget weddings!

Heck YES to online invitations!!! Super individual,

Jamie I'm weirdly fascinated with numbers actually, so thank you for breaking this down for me! 😂

An upper outlier can be WAYYYYY higher than a low outlier, the lowest you can go is zero, I don’t even know what the highest you could go is….

Minted was too expensive for me haha! I’m making mine from scratch. Less than $100 for my paper goods!

Girl. In Texas we have to have great food & drinks!

MUSIC IS SO IMPORTANT TO THE PARTY!!! Music can make or break your event, and musicians need to be paid their worth!

Postable for invites. It was painless and perfect!

This is so positive! Thank you for making a wedding feel more possible!

I would love a video on E-vites and using websites, maybe even making one just for your wedding! I think that would be really savvy and interesting:)

I usually speed up videos to not spend hours upon hours on youtube but this video made me stop, rewind, rewatch hahaha loved it ! thanks Jamie!

More floral DIY videos? Yes, please! P.S. online invitations are the biggest saver for us. Just the stamps would be hundreds of NZ$ to send to Europe and the US 😅

This content makes me feel so validated. I love it and love you, Jamie!

I enjoyed all of the numbers and yes please do videos about invitations !!

I`m dyi-ing my flowers with origamis. They look amazing and a block of 500 sheets costs only 10 euros! (of course that costs time but if you have it, that`s awesome!)

Yes Jamie!!! More floral DIYs!!!

THIS is super helpful. I was starting to feel like I’m blowing my budget when I went from my wish of $7000 to an actuality of $25k lol.

Thank you so much for your videos! They’re super helpful. 💖

Yes please more invitation and flower videos :) they are so fun to watch and to get ideas

I would’ve loved for you to add the cost of a wedding for the price that won in its category to see how much it’d come out too. Like venue florals etc and see the total in cost

This content is SO helpful, Jaimie!!! Definitely would love more on DIY florals and invites! Your channel has helped us so much in the planning process!

Love the hair x

Commenting to say your diy videos are my favorites

Just joined the master plan and I’m so excited to get started!! ❤️

Your hair is beautiful!!!

Great video!! I appreciate hearing the statistics of your audience! It helps out things into perspective

My sister and my boyfriends sister is both getting married next year and they have have compete different budgets and let me tell you one thing they have in common… they both exceeded their budgets. Safe to say my boyfriend and I will probably elope or have a court wedding.

This is the exact message I needed to hear right now! Thank you!!!

Yes!! More invitations, and flowers videos

This hair!!! 😍😍😍😍 Thanks girl for the info! Helps me guide the awesome brides I work with!

I booked a local dj who has played at some well known bars in my area. And he's actually a friend of a friend charging only 1k for all the hrs i need him for. Im so excited!!

Planning my wedding has been a wild ride! However, you have made this process so much better!

More invite videos!!! Im struggling through that right now!

Yes! I would absolutely love more videos on how to make our own save the dates and invitations!

Please more floral and DIY videos!!! Trying to do as absolutely much as possible myself and appreciate the guidance so much

PPLLEEASSSEEE do a travel destination wedding video!! i LOVE your videos ❤️i’ve been following you since my current bf (hopefully fiancé soon 👀) and i got together!!!

I appreciate this video so much! Thank you for making me feel less alone during this process. I love that you were brave enough to have such an honest talk $$$ and weddings.

Re: alcohol budget: I'm in Portland and I'm discovering that our bartender budgets are *way* higher than your estimates, which I suspect is due to our more rigorous liquor regulations. We are doing beer/wine only for 80 ppl, 4 hours of service, disposables, no soda/water service, and the SERVICE cost (we buy alcohol separately) is $2250!! With booze it's going to be like $35/head!!!

Love the curls on you!!

YES PLEASE DO MORE DIY VIDEOS!! I love ALL your videos because you try to teach us to enjoy our planning journey while still being budget friendly but learning to do DIY projects is always appreciated 😊💞

I had my wedding back in January and did a lot of diy. Not tons but I would say a good half of everything was diy. It does make for more work but I found it fun and a good way to hang out with my bridesmaids cause we would work on things together.

OMG THAT BEAUTIFUL HAIR! I LOVE curls!!! And great video, as always! I'm already married, but I still watch!

I get it. I need to save some money to stick to the budget.

So grateful for this video and the hope it brings. Jamie, I am so impressed with you talking about the importance of knowing which statistics are being reported (mean, median, mode), how statistics can be skewed, and why the stats we see tend to lead us to believe we are alone in our budget boat. Thank you for taking the poll and sharing the statistics with all of us. It was encouraging and helpful.

I found this video so encouraging! I’m preparing for engagement and worried about the cost of my wedding. So seeing so many people finding affordable vendors gives me hope ☺️

These stat's tickled my brain, thank you

As an engineer, I appreciate the numbers hahaha. Also can't wait to see all the videos you make in relation to these statistics!!

YES for floral DIY here!!

I love this video! So interesting.

I loved this! Was really helpful info!