It’s All About the Benjamins, Baby

Now tell me:

What y’all wanna do? Wanna be ballers? Shot-callers? Brawlers?
Who be dippin’ in the Benz with the spoilers?

(Look, I know that ‘Benjamins’ Is a Puff Daddy song, but I couldn’t find any good 90s-nostalgia-trip pics of Puffy. But mostly, I just really love this pic if Fiddy, and I’d be loath to do a post about money and *not* use this spectacular image. Please take a moment to really observe the look on this man’s face. He’s got a fistfulof dollars and is trying to look hard, but he’s just not pulling it off. I haven’t seen a more benign visage since Alan Thicke as the patriarch of the Seaver clan on Growing Pains. Really, it looks like Fiddy is giving his son a scolding. “Now boy, I may have a panty on my head, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to listen to what I say.” )

The average American wedding costs $25,000. Think about that for a second. My entire college career cost, like, 10 thousand less than that. Over the course of five years (shut up, OK?), whereas the average couple blows all that cash on ONE DAY. It’s kind of a mindfuck, isn’t it?

And then think, pop culture offers up shows like Rich Bride, Poor Bride, Platinum Weddings, and My Big, Fat Fabulous Wedding as a kind of consumer porn spending-orgy. Uh, needless to say, I’ve seen pretty much every episode of these shows. Yeeeeeah. I like to think these shows keep me grounded and stop me from spending insane sums on bullshit like hologram-monograms and cinematic lighting concepts. But the fact remains, until today, I had no idea how much I was actually spending on this wedding…

  

 My original budget is $10,000. Which, in the grand scheme of wedding shit, is not much at all. If I’m gonna host a party for 300 of my closest boozehound freeloaders, I’m gonna have to watch every single cent as they slide out from between my fingertips into oblivion. Keeping on track is so hard, in fact, that I’ve been burying my head in the sand about tallying the shit up until this morning.

The stuff in green is stuff we’ve already paid for, and the stuff in blue is the known costs of things we need, but haven’t booked yet.

 

Invitations: $413

Decor (so far): $60

Photographer: $1,300 (deposit paid)

Rings: $400

Venue: $3,700. (deposit paid)

 

Flowers: $400

PA Rental: $230

Marriage Lisence: $50

Tux Rental: $125

 

OK, so tallying up the above known costs, we’re at: $6678. – That’s not that bad!

 

 

Here are the things we’ll need to pay for, but the costs are as-of-yet unknown, my guesses are in red:

Cake:  $300

Food: $3,000

Officiant Fee: $50

Mailing of Invitations: $150

Favors, Tables, Chairs, Linens, More Decor, and other misc.: $800

Which brings us to a grand total of: $10,978. – Only $978 over our original budget.

Now, to be fair, I’m not including the cost of my dress & bridal accessories, b/c I consider that an all me expense, whereas the rest of the wedding costs will be split equally between me & Mr. Panda. But that’s for another post entirely. So yeah, I went from white-knuckle apprehension to feeling really good about my powers of budgeteering. I’ll keep you guys posted on how it actually pans out come wedding day. But, for now, I gloat!