Use our Free Wedding Budget Calculator to Allocate & Break Down Wedding Costs Easily

Let’s say you have budgeted N300k for your Nigerian wedding. You certainly don’t want to start spending it, to later run out of cash. Dividing your overall budget to specific expenses (just like women make a shopping list) is a great way to use your wedding budget and avoid over-spending.  We have a formula brides can use to know how much to spend on wedding food, photography, couple’s outfits, reception venue hire and other wedding things. Our free wedding budget calculator and wedding expense breakdown formula will tell (suggest) you how much to spend on different parts of your wedding event, so you no longer need to ‘crack’ your brain. Read on to see the percentages and an example of using the percentage with a wedding budget, as well as other methods of splitting a budget. Also, you’ll be able to download our wedding budget percentage split template. Scroll down to dig in.

Below is the percentages that our wedding budget calculator worksheet is based on, in case you were wondering or want to do it manually:

#a. Couple’s wedding attire + wedding rings    24%
#b. Stationery (invites, program etc) + Souvenirs    6%
#c. Venue + Venue Decoration (including chair rentals, other rentals)    18%
#d. Reception (food, drinks, cake)    21%
#e. Entertainment & visuals (MC, DJ/ music band, Photos and/ or Video coverage)   14%
#f. Miscellaneous (just-in-case fund)    17%

*NOTE: Reserving 17% for miscellaneous expenses to cover any unforseen or overlooked expenses that may come up later, will ensure that you won’t hav to panic or borrow in case anything arises later, even if when you start shopping, of if some things cost more than you thought or if you decide to lavish on a few tempting areas.

3 Ways to Spread A Wedding Budget into Expense Areas

There are three ways to breakdown your wedding budget – guessing, the manual method, and using the wedding budget calculator.

1. The Guestimation method: This is the regular, popular method. Here, you can either guess how much to allocate to different areas of your wedding – catering, wedding attires, decoration and so on;
2. Another method is to use a wedding expense percentage allocation guide (below), like the one we created for you (as illustrated in the image below) – you need to use your calculator with the suggested percentages below, in order to get a breakdown of your wedding expenses. Let’s say you have N400k for your wedding, that means 21% (i.e. N84,000) of that would be reserved for food and drinks; 18% for venue and decor; 24% for couple’s outfits and so on. Hope you get the gist?
3. The Wedding Calculator is the third and easiest method is more like an automatic way of breaking down the wedding expenses – read on for the detailed steps;

How to Break Down the Wedding Expenses Using the Nigerian Wedding Budget Calculator

Step 1: Set a figure as your overall wedding budget

You may choose to simply set any amount you desire as what you plan to spend on each wedding thing. But if you have no idea what to do here, use our percentage allocation guide below to plan how much you should spend on what.

Step 2: Breakdown the Wedding Budget

In a previous post on how to create a wedding budget from scratch, I showed you how to breakdown your overall wedding budget into small parts. I also mentioned how our team here uses a wedding budget percentage allocation guide to work out the wedding budget breakdown.

• You can download the wedding budget breakdown guide from our tools page here, if you want to do it manually.

And, if you’re one of those who simply hate math,you’ll love how easy it is to use our Nigerian wedding budget calculator to automatically suggest wedding budget breakdown – continue reading details in the rest of this post.

By the way, you can simply allocate any amount you like to any wedding budget list item, there’s no hard and fast rules about it.

Step 3: Download our Nigerian wedding budget calculator

Click here to download NaijaGlamWedding’s wedding budget calculator to your computer – scroll down the page to see the tool you want, as there are other downloads on that wedding planning tools page.

Open it and then:

• Type in your wedding budget (amount) into the yellow box specified
• You will see the breakdown automagically calculated for you
• Copy the breakdown of your budget and use it to plan your wedding costing.

Example: Using the Wedding Budget Calculator to Break Down Wedding Expenses

Here’s an example of how to use the wedding calculator to know your wedding expenses breakdown:

• Say, I have a budget of N200,000 to spend for my wedding.
• So, I open the wedding budget calculator and type in the wedding budget above (N200,000);
• I should see the following breakdown, automatically calculated fpr me:

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:                N34,000.00
Total Wedding Budget:    N200,000.00

AN IMPORTANT NOTE WITH OUR NIGERIAN WEDDING BUDGET CALCULATOR

*The above percentage breakdown is strictly based on the Nigerian bridal market and cost of stuff in Naija. This is different for other countries. So, if your wedding will not take place in Naija, be sure to use the wedding budget percentage breakdown for the country of your wedding location, provided by the local wedding planners.

The Nigerian bridal scene is much different from that of the USA and UK, and so the percentage allocation for Nigerian weddings vary quite significantly from theirs. This is because traditionally, their priorities for wedding elements vary from ours. For example, in most Nigerian weddings, top priority is on the bride and groom’s attires; in addition, unlike the Onyibos, we attach much less priority on wedding flowers as a decor.There are other differences  but that’s just some. So, using other countries’ percentage allocation for wedding budget does not just work here in Nigeria.

Finally, Make the Complete Wedding Budget and Expenses List

After breaking down your budget into the major expense categories, you should write down the list of things that need to be bought or vendor services that need to be hired under each category.

For example, under couples’ wedding attire, you should be listing these: bridal shoes, grooms shoes, wedding rings, wedding dress, aso-oke, gele and so so. So, you should do that for all the budget categories – venue, stationery, reception, entertainment etc. You can continue making the full wedding budget list or download our ready-made budget list, which we created to help our readers.

• Use our ready-to-use LIST of usual Nigerian wedding expenses – they’re what makes up the bulk of wedding budget in Nigeria.

What If You Hate Math?

We’re giving away our Nigerian wedding budget calculator for free to our readers who hate math – to help ease the stress of making their wedding budget. When you download it, the only thing you have to do is type in your overall wedding budget, and your wedding budget breakdown will display for you to copy and use.

What Do You Think About our Free Nigerian Wedding Budget Calculator?

So, if you hate math, our wedding budget calculator will do the calculations and breakdown for you (automatically and auto-magically) – so that you don’t have to worry yourself or crack your brain. All you need to do is follow the steps above to download and use NaijaGlamWedding’s wedding budget calculator and allocator.

SHOW US YOU LIKE IT: And, if after using NaijaGlamWedding’s wedding budget calculator, you found it helpful, come back here to tell us in the comments below, on Facebook or Twitter. And, also – help us to tell your friends and your friends’ friends – that’s all we ask for:)

Now, tell me in the comments below – which of the 3 methods (above) have you used or prefer to break down a wedding budget? Do you like it? What do you think of the Nigerian wedding budget calculator?