Want to start making the wedding budget for your big day? It’s easy and I will teach you. Budgeting for a wedding is the process of estimating how much your wedding will cost. In this post, I will take you step by step through how to budget for every money you will spend for your wedding. Swipe/ scroll down to keep reading.
One of the questions I receive every week is on the topic of how to budget for a Nigerian wedding includes: how do I know much will my wedding cost? how to set a wedding budget, how to breakdown the budget, how to track wedding expenses, how to stick to a wedding budget and lots more.
There are a lot of advantages to making a budget before spending a penny for your wedding. A wedding budget will tell you how much to spend on every wedding thing. Another advantage of making a budget is to ensure that you avoid overspending during wedding planning.
This post provides answers to such questions, and I will also teach you how to budget for your wedding step by step. Scroll down to see our quick 6 step-method of coming off with a wedding budget from scratch.
The 7 Steps to Making a Wedding Budget
Once you have decided on a figure as your wedding budget, the next thing is to allocate the percentage of that budget to major categories of wedding expenses. Follow along these steps to come up with your own wedding budget breakdown.
TOOLS YOU MAY NEED:
Step 1. Set Your Spending Limit (aka Budget)
You can’t make a wedding budget if you don’t know how much you can spend. So, budgeting starts with deciding and saying how much to spend.
Think – set a limit of how much you do not want to exceed. This is simply done by you setting any amount you believe you can afford to spend on your entire wedding event – the church/ religious ceremony + the reception. For Nigerians, you may want to include your traditional wedding budget here, but it may be a good idea to do that separate from your white wedding budget.
So, write down an amount for the maximum money you (have and) want to spend on your entire wedding. This is your total wedding budget.
NOTE: I’m talking of the money you ALREADY HAVE in your own bank account. Please do not include money you plan to borrow from someone. Do not include money someone has promised you.
A wedding budget is like making a grocery list or the usual list every woman writes out before going to shop for food items. You first check how much money you have, make the list and write prices, total up the costs and take things out here and there to ensure that you can focus on buying what your money can afford. Making a wedding budget is similar.
You only make a grocery list when you have the money ready and ready to go to the market, right? Same with wedding budgeting.
Wait till you have the money or budget with the amount you already have and find a way to make it work – BECAUSE even small-money weddings can turn out well, if well-managed.
YOUR ACTION ITEM/ ASSIGNMENT: Now, set your own maximum wedding cost or spending limit (aka budget)
Step 2. Do an Expense Categories Breakdown and Allocate Costs
You can go straight to doing a complete list of expenses, but first doing a wedding budget breakdown by expense categories will help you stay within budget and not overspend.
A simple way is to use percentages to allocate costs to each expense category. We created a free wedding budget percentage allocation guide to give you a breakdown of how much to allocate to each expense category.
I’ll guide you on the steps:
- Categories or group your wedding expenses
- List the Major Expense Categories in a Nigerian Wedding: I already did that for you, to save you time. You can copy and use it. Feel free to add or remove from the list to suit your needs.
- Food and drinks
- Venue hire, decoration and rentals
- Couple’s outfits & accessories
- Stationeries & souvenirs
- Entertainment & photography
- Miscellaneous Expenses
- Allocate a percentage or how much of your wedding budget you want to spend under the various wedding expense categories. To save you time, below is our guide of sample wedding expense categories and budget percentages allocation guide based on our updated wedding budget breakdown and calculator page. This is a guide to get you started, but feel free to change up things to suit your needs.
- Food and drinks – 38%
- Venue hire, decoration and rentals – 20%
- Couple’s outfits & accessories – 12%
- Stationeries & souvenirs – 5%
- Entertainment & photography – 20%
- Miscellaneous Expenses – 5%
- Add up the costs you allocated to each expense category. This total should be the same as the overall budget you set.
TOOLS: You can do this with paper and pen in your wedding notebook or use an online app like GoogleDoc/ Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
Here’s an example of how I start by making a wedding budget breakdown into expense categories:
(For example) Assuming you set a budget of N200,000 to spend for your wedding, my initial breakdown by wedding expenses categories could look like this:
- Wedding attire (bride + groom): N48,000.00
- Stationery + Souvenir: N12,000.00
- Venue + Decor N36,000.00
- Wedding Reception N42,000.00
- Entertainment N28,000.00
- Miscellaneous (just in case) N34,000.00 (In a later step, explained why you should have this)
- Total Wedding Budget: N200,000.00 (confirm that this total is the same as your overall budget).
YOUR ACTION ITEM: Use the same wedding expense categories and format in the above example to do your initial wedding budget breakdown.
- I used our NaijaGlamWedding budget calculator to give me the above breakdown. It’s faster and automatic – doesn’t require pressing a calculator. Feel free to use it – it’s free and you can download it here ==> free Nigerian wedding budget calculator.
Step 3: Make a Detailed Itemized Expense List (of Things to Spend Money On)
It’s important to know exactly how much you want to pay for every single wedding thing or vendor service before you go out. Planning your budget down to the exact cost of each item will save you time so that you can pay for things right away, without needing to go back home to decide.
Now, you’ll want to make a detailed itemized list of what to spend your wedding budget on. Think about what you need under each of the wedding expense categories you listed in the step above.
In this step, you’re going to expand on what you have in each expense category that you listed above. Itemize your needs one by one to come up with your complete list of the expenses.
For example, you will want to make a list of everything (expenses) you plan to spend under wedding attire – such as wedding gown, shoes etc. You also want to list what to spend your wedding reception budget on – such as wedding cake, food, drinks, small chops etc. I hope you get the idea?
What are the things that make up a wedding budget? If you don’t know what to budget for, I already made you a ready-made sample Nigerian wedding expenses list template with a list of must-have things to budget for in a Nigerian style wedding.
YOUR ACTION ITEM: Itemize your own complete list of wedding expenses. You can do it on paper or use a computer program (Excel or Word), or GoogleDoc/ Google Sheets, depending on the one you’re comfortable with. If you have a wedding notebook, there’s a specified for listing your budget.
Step 4: Reserve Some Funds for Miscellaneous Expenses
The reality is that there will be a thing or two that you forgot to budget for when making your complete list of expenses. According to one of our married readers (ZainMum), you will always spend more than what you have budgeted. She is right, but having Miscellaneous Expenses in advance can help you avoid overspending.
The whole purpose of making a budget is to avoid making extra unbudgeted expenses. We know that some unplanned expenses always come up, so keep a part of your budget to handle that. Your reserved fund under ‘Miscellaneous Expenses’ is where you’ll be drawing money from for anything that arises.
I strongly recommend that couples set aside some money to take care of any forgotten expense(s) or sudden unplanned unbudgeted expenses that may arise later. This is known as ‘Miscellaneous Expenses’ and should be the last item on your list of wedding expenses. It should be carved out from your overall wedding budget (you can see it in the sample wedding expense categories breakdown in a previous step).
How much should you reserve for Miscellaneous Expenses? You can reserve between 5% and 10% of your wedding budget for unexpected or miscellaneous expenses.
Your wedding budget is not complete and useless if you don’t set aside money for Miscellaneous Expenses. If you do not do this, you’re likely to get to a point when something that’s not on your list needs to be bought and paid for. And you’ll be surprised and stressed, running around looking for where to borrow extra money or dip hands into your savings, which is not advisable.
YOUR ACTION ITEM: Add “Miscellaneous Expenses’ in the expense list that you made in the previous step.
Step 5: Market Price Research – Find the Actual Cost of Things in the Market
You want a realistic and accurate budget and not one whereby you’ll get to the market or want to pay for a venue or vendor and be surprised that it’s more expensive than you budgeted. That means you’re going to go out and get the real price of things, no estimating and no guessing.
So, you need to know how much things actually cost. Do not guest the price of any item. To use accurate prices in your wedding budget, you should do a market price research. This exercise can be done in a week or more, as there are a lot of expenses to research prices for.
Here’s what to do in this step:
- Print out your complete list of wedding expenses, which you made in a previous step
- Go out to the market and stores that sell the things you listed and make price inquiries.
- Visit venues and vendors to get price quotation
- Use emails, phone calls, WhatsApp messages, Facebook and Instagram DMs (Direct Messages) to make preliminary contacts with venues, vendors and some stores
- Write down the prices (in your notebook or in a note app on your phone or wherever you choose).
- When you get home, write or enter the prices into your wedding expenses spreadsheet or page in your wedding notebook.
- Also, make a note of shop address and contact numbers – you’ll need them when you want to go shopping.
- Write down the price of each item in your expense list. Keep a note of alternative prices (up to three price variations for each item) in case the need arises to cut cost or there’s room to buy a more expensive version of a thing. I explained more about why and how to do this in my post on How to Stick to Your Budget (to Avoid Overspending).
- Add up the individual prices and see if the overall total equals your wedding budget amount or is less.
- If you have a total cost higher than your set wedding budget, you need to review things by picking lower-priced versions of some things, then total up again and see if you’re within budget.
Once the total cost of the expenses in your list is not over your set budget, you can start going to shop and book venue and vendors. That’s how to make a realistic wedding budget that works.
YOUR ACTION ITEM: Add prices against each item in your wedding expense list. These are your budgeted costs.
Step 6: Record and Track Your Expenses
So, at this stage, you’ve set a budget, made an expense breakdown, done a market price research and have a realistic expense list that is within your budget.
If you don’t know much you have spent, you can’t know when you have overspent. It’s important to keep tracking your budget spending. In the previous step, I covered how to set a budget, break down that budget, do a market price research to confirm price of items. After that you are set to start spending your wedding budget. But you need to regularly track your spending – I’ll show you how in this section.
This exercise will help you identify where you are overspending so that you can adjust before you spend above your overall wedding budget. You’ll also be able to know exactly how much is left to use for the remaining things. By tracking your expenses, you’ll never be one of those brides or grooms that wake up one day ad say ‘I didn’t know there’s not enough money left to do X or Y’.
Once you start shopping and paying for wedding services, you have to record every single money that goes out. This is important because as you go out shopping and hiring venue and vendors, the reality is that some prices may change slightly (higher or lower) and you want to know where you are on your money – at every point in time.
You don’t have to go to the bank to know how much of your wedding budget you have spent, how much you have left or whether you’ve almost used all the money you budgeted.
STEPS: Here’s how to track your wedding expenses:
- Every single time you buy something or pay someone for a wedding service, write it down – what you spent on and how much
- Write down the actual amount you paid out for each item – call this ‘actual cost’;
- Record the actual cost next to the budgeted cost in your notebook, preferably in a spreadsheet (Google Sheets online or Microsoft Excel);
- Make a note of the actual minus budgeted cost, for each item. Did you spend an exact amount, more or less? If you spent more than you budgeted, you need to watch it.
- Add up all your actual costs (actual amounts already spent) – this is your total actual cost
- What is your total budget minus total actual cost? If it is lower than your total budget, you’re doing good
That’s how to track your wedding expenses to find out whether you’re within budget. Watch the video below for more.
YOUR ACTION ITEM/ ASSIGNMENT: Make a list of your wedding expenses with a note of the budgeted and actual costs of all the items.
The video tutorial below from Wura Manola (a Nigerian UK-based wedding planner) validates what I’ve been teaching here on how to make a trackable wedding budget list, and how to cut your coat according to your size when planning a Naija wedding (WATCH it – step 6 is down below).
Step 7: Look at Other People’s Sample Wedding Budgets for Ideas
If you’re like most brides and grooms, you want to see a sample wedding budget. Okay, checkout 5 different examples of Nigerian wedding budgets of other couples.
First, see this wedding budget tutorial from the celebrity wedding planner, Funke Bucknor-Obruthe – and then scroll down to READ our 6 steps on how to budget for any wedding – Nigerian wedding or any type.
WHAT’S NEXT AFTER MAKING A BUDGET?
Now that you’ve learned how to make a wedding budget, the next step is to actually save up that amount of money. I created a 7-step action plan that shows how to save money for a wedding.
More Wedding Budgeting Advice from Wedding Planners
Funke Bucknor’s Take on How to Budget for a Wedding
Wura Manola’s Take on How to Budget for a Wedding
Final Thoughts on Budgeting For a Wedding
In the wedding planning process, the budget is one of the very first things to do right after your engagement, and after choosing a wedding date.
Don’t do this ==> The wrong way to wedding planning is to start from looking for a reception venue and vendors or shopping for your D-day things. That usually leads to overspending and later having to manage small left-over change for the rest of the wedding. It’s best to never spend a kobo until you’ve made a wedding budget.
Some couples start with a budget but end up spending more than they planned. To know how to stay on-budget, follow my steps on how to avoid overspending during wedding planning.
Thanks for reading this far. I hope that the above steps help you organize your wedding budget and figure out how much your wedding will cost.
- Your Next Steps: Once your wedding budget is set, it’s time for you to start the wedding planning proper – use our white wedding planning check-list of things to do, and our trad wedding planning to-do list.
- In case you still have questions on this topic of budgeting, check out my answers on common questions about budgeting for a wedding.
Tips & Ideas to Make a Small Budget Work
We’ve got your back, check out our tips and advice for how to use small money to plan a wow Nigerian wedding:
- All Our Tips on Planning Small Budget Weddings and How to Save Cost
- 19 Practical Tips for Planning an Inexpensive Wedding in Nigeria
- 9 Smart Ideas to Save Costs When Planning a Nigerian Wedding on a Small Budget
- How to Plan Small Wedding in Nigeria and Still Wow Your Guests (Part 1)
- Unique Ideas to Plan a Big-Girls Wedding with Small Money
- Low-Key Wedding: How to Plan a Great Low-Key Wedding In Nigeria (part 2 small wedding planning)
- Simple Ideas to Reduce Cost of a Wedding without Reducing the Quality
So, over to you – let me know in the comments: where you are with working out how much your Nigerian wedding will cost? Did like the 6 step tutorial (above) to making a wedding budget to estimate the cost of your wedding in Nigeria?
Prinze says
Good afternoon ma’am.
First and foremost, thank you so much for this explanation.
My wedding is coming this December by special grace of God, and this guide will help me.
Stella Anokam says
Hi Prinze, thank you for the feedback. I am happy that our 7 steps to making a wedding budget (from scratch) will help you towards planning for your upcoming December wedding.
Hi Stella,
First off I just want to say I love your blog and thank you for all the effort you put in.
I’m planning on getting married in January in Nigeria. We’re a young couple and we’re thinking of a budget of 350k. Is it possible to have the traditional and white wedding on this budget please? Thank you
Hi Jessica, thank you for that sweet feedback. It always feels good to know that someone appreciates the post here and finds them helpful.
Yes, you can have a N350k trad and white wedding budget wedding, on 2 conditions: that you’ll invite a small number of guests and that you’ll have your white wedding traditional engagement on same day with a joint reception party.
>19 Tips for Planning a Nice and Inexpensive Nigerian Wedding
Another thing, you can have a N350k wedding if you have already taken care of the ‘customary engagement list’ for a traditional wedding.
You’ll need to get realistic on your budget and save money wherever you can. You can find beautiful wedding gowns to rent for cheap. It’s better to restrict your guests to a minimum and have a beautiful small wedding that few guests will enjoy than invite many people and not be able to delight them all with enough or good food and drinks.
MORE: 9 Ways to Cut Cost on Your Wedding
So, yes, you can have a N350k wedding. I wish you all the best. let’s know how it goes.
Plz I will be wedding this year but I have a budget of 500,000.00
Help me break it down
Hello Deborah, a rough guide is to divide your budget into 2 parts, and keep half for food and drinks. Spread the remaining half over the remaining wedding expenses. With that budget, keep the number of guests small, so that food and drinks will be enough for the guests you have (no one likes to see hungry wedding guests or people scrambling for food at a wedding). Below are more helpful articles to help you:
– Wedding budget breakdown percentages calculation – use the stated percentages with your calculator
– How to know how many guests your (food) budget can cater for, so that you don’t over-invite people.
Hope the above tips help you.
Pls we planning of getting married by 2019 with a 200 guest and 300,000 budget. Pls how far can it go both for traditional n wedding. Thanks
Hi Shine, 200 guests for N300k?
A simple way to know if that amount of money would be enough for your wedding, at the minimum, is to assume a plate of food and a soft drink would cost N1k or N1,500. For your 200 guests, how much would that be, and would the balance be enough for the remaining wedding expenses?
So, you do that math, and decide whether to reduce your guest number to what your budget can afford or whether you should add more money to feed the 200 people.
Hope that tip helps.
Hello am I need a breakdown on how to get my traditional wedding into a reality with 600,000
Hi Princess, here is the breakdown of steps to plan your Traditional Wedding (click).
Hope that helps.
Hi.
I’m travelling from Israel to NIgeria for a traditional Yuroba wedding of a dear person who has been like a son of mine. I’m not NIgerian and this is my first trip.
What am I expected to bring as a present?
in my country we bring money. is that so in Nigeria as well? how much?
Am I expected to bring anything else? I was thinking of small souveniers from Israel.
what about his family and hers?
I’d appreciate any tips…
TNx a lot.
Effie
Hello Effie, here are my answers to your questions about what is the most appropriate wedding gift a guest can present at a Nigerian wedding:
– In Nigerian weddings, gifts are not obligated, but appreciated. And, there’s no rule about the size or amount to spend on gifts – Nigerian wedding party hosts appreciate gifts of all sizes and costs.
– Money gifts/ cash: Cash gifts in envelopes are very common type of wedding gifts in Nigeria. So, it’s no different from your country.
– How much cash gift is appropriate as wedding gift? The general saying in Nigeria is “no amount is too small” when it concerns money gifts, and so you can give as you are led to or desire and it would be appreciated. Nigerian couples appreciate physical presence of their guests way more than presents, especially for guests traveling from far countries or out-of-town. Our tip: give an amount that is comfortable to you. As a guide, give the Naira equivalent of the amount you would have given if it was in your country – but be sure to consider that because you have spent money on travels, it’s okay to give less than usual.
– Are you expected to bring anything else? I was thinking of small souvenirs from Israel.
– Are you expected to bring anything else? No, you are not expected to bring anything else aside from your presence.
– You were thinking of small souvenirs from Israel: It is okay. The couple would be thrilled to receive souvenirs from Israel, especially if they are Christians.
– What about bride and groom’s family? His and her family would not be expecting anything or gifts from you – your presence is what they consider the biggest wedding gift to their children.
I hope I have answered your questions (above). If not, feel free to leave ask more.
Thanks for visiting my Nigerian Wedding blog, and congratulation on your “son’s” upcoming wedding. Let me know if you have any more questions. Do enjoy your trip to, and stay, in Nigeria.
I and my partner lives in uk we are planing a wedding for next year and our budget is 1.5 million naira, can you tell me what type of wedding we can have with this amount please
Hello James, welcome to NaijaGlam’s Nigerian Wedding website. Here’s my answer to your question:
I don’t know if you are talking about both the traditional and white wedding, or just the white wedding. But, anyway, I’ll assume that you’re talking of both (since most Nigerians who live abroad usually want to make a single trip down to Nigeria for both types of wedding celebrations).
How you divide up that amount depends on the number of guests you plan to have at each. However, I’ll just give you some suggestions you can work with or customise to suit your particular situation:
-You can budget 1 million Naira for the white wedding and 500 thousand Naira for the trad (that’s including costs of travels within Nigeria, to/ from the village for the trad). Even if you’ve not presented the customary engagement list/ bride price, you can still work with that amount to take care of that, as well as host a trad wedding reception party.
-So, that leaves you with N1 million Naira for the white wedding. The biggest money-eaters here are: venue, food and drinks (reserve about half of your N1m white wedding budget for this). So, that leaves you with N500k for the rest of the things – you can click here to see a list of typical wedding expenses. And you can click here to see our percentage guide to use to divide-up or allocate money to different wedding things.
NOTE: Recently, the cost of things have increased in Nigeria, and you may find yourself racking your brain on how to make your wedding budget meet your expected expenses. The best way is to cut down on the number of guests-to-invite, so that your food and drinks (and venue) costs will drop (large event halls cost more than smaller ones).
I wish you a fab wedding celebration. Hope those tips help.
I HV 450.000 thousand pls help me break down this to HV successful wedding with 150 guest
Hi Nancy,
You can use these percentages to break down that amount:
Venue + venue decoration + chair rentals + other rentals –18%
Wedding attire + wedding rings: 24%
Souvenirs, Invitation cards etc – 6%
Reception (food/ catering, drink, wedding cake) – 21%
Entertainment + visuals (MC, DJ/ Live band, photography/ video coverage) – 14%
Any other things that come up: 17%
*I used our (NaijaGlamWedding’s) wedding budget percentages/ calculator – you can check it here.
Thanks for ur comments but my spouse said he can only afford 500.000thousand pls I need a break down on this so that I will HV a successful wedding.
Hello Nancy, below is a wedding budget breakdown you can start with or customize:
-Venue + venue decoration + chair rentals + other rentals –18% (N90,000)
-Wedding attire + wedding rings: 24% (N120,000)
-Souvenirs, Invitation cards etc – 6% (30,000)
-Reception (food/ catering, drink, wedding cake) – 21% (105,000)
-Entertainment + visuals (MC, DJ/ Live band, photography/ video coverage) – 14% (N70,000)
-Any other things that come up: 17% (85,000)
*I used our (NaijaGlamWedding’s) wedding budget percentages/ calculator – you can check it here.
this budget of 200k has really given me a reason to chill. Thank you! in other news, am a 2016 bride to be
Hi Opeyemi. That’s nice to know. Just chill, my dear, and find a way to organize your wedding with the amount of money you have. I wish you the very best. We have lots of practical wedding planning tips for a budget couple with small money – ensure to read them here.
Thanks for such productive steps, I am self confident now on what to do and what to expect.
I live in the US and I am planning to travel to Nigeria for my traditional wedding. My lady lives in Nigeria I just have a budget of 400,000 naira, and I desire the best wedding experience but don’t know how to manage that money, please give me some advice. Thanks
Thanks for your feedback, Ita – we love hearing from our readers.
You can have a fabulous wedding with that amount if you stay realistic and trim down on some unecessary expenses and invite fewer people. The biggest money eaters are wedding venue and food and drinks. AND if you reduce the number of people you will invite, catering cost can come down. To help you with ideas on practical things to do to have a fab wedding with that amount, click to seee our tips in these posts:
–Everything about planning a small wedding that is classy – over 100 practical ways and tips on where and how to reduce wedding cost
–Sample wedding budget where they spent less than N500k – look at this budget and see if you can pick one or two ideas.
Thanks so much for this info. Planning for a wedding on low budget seems like an overwhelming, herculean task. But with ur advice, the mountain in front of me is beginning to look smaller. I’ll start taking down notes with the ideas u gave. Thanks a million. God bless u
You are so welcome, Chioma. Feedback like yours makes my day:) I absolutely feel you – that’s why I wrote this post – glad to know that it has helped simplify the task of making a wedding budget. I also suggest you read my others posts on different ways to work with a small budget to achieve a dream wedding that looks like a million dollars:) See the topics below AND I have just included the post links to the end of this post (so SCROLL UP) – the section is right on top of ‘wedding budget TAKEAWAY’.
-9 Smart Ideas to Save Costs When Planning a Nigerian Wedding on a Small Budget
-How to Plan Small Wedding in Nigeria and Still Wow Your Guests
-Unique Ideas to Plan a Big-Girls Wedding with Small Money
-Low-Key Wedding: How to Plan a Great Low-Key Wedding In Nigeria
-Simple Ideas to Reduce Cost of a Wedding without Reducing the Quality
The mere thought of this site simply blows my mind. Weldone. Thanks
Thank you, Emem. We are here to help simplify wedding planning for Naija brides.