How Do You Save?

[allanahx]

So the big question is: How do you save?

Do you have a separate bank account?
Do you have a tin you put money in?
Do you put money on currency cards?

How do you know how much to save? How did you work out your budget?

ALSO How long did it take you?

 

[LadyD]

We found starting with our guest list very helpful. Knowing the potential number of people we'd need to feed and how much we had to spend per person is a huge chunk of the budget that is highly variable and somewhat easier to control than other items provided by Disney. To make our guest list, we just basically put down everyone we'd love to be there in an ideal world.

Looking through other BEOs and some of the rudimentary information Disney provides before the planning session, you can get a rough idea of how much the extras you want will cost. A lot of the venue fees are listed too, so those are easy to add in.

The hardest part of our budget has been falling in love with items at the planning session that we found out the price for after we fell in love with it. It is a lot harder to say no when you really like something without knowing the price upfront than knowing the price up front. That is how our floral ended up over budget haha.

 

[allanahx]

we have a rough guest list but our problem is that we both have big families and we don't really want them to all come...

 

[alyaki]

we have a rough guest list but our problem is that we both have big families and we don't really want them to all come...

With big families...is it that your immediate families are big, or extended? Both Raist and I have huge extended families (my mother had 11 siblings, father only 2, but most had multiple children if they had any; Raist's mother and father each had 3 siblings, but he has as many first cousins as I do). What we did was invited the people we decided would be not only the most likely to come, but also who we really cared about being there. We didn't try to invite all of our extended family (did invite all immediate families), and we only added on a handful of friends. Because of how much travel is needed, and the fact that we've kept it small (30 people), we can say that we decided to have a more intimate wedding, and keep it to what we can afford.

We actually decided on Disney because for the same price, or less, that we would pay where we live, we could go to Disney and get away with having a smaller wedding and not have to invite everyone. We didn't want a huge wedding.

A lot of our planning for figuring out our budget and if we could afford it included the same stuff that LadyD did.

 

[allanahx]

I have as my immediate family:
Mum and Dad
one sister who is in a family of four - her, fiancé, 2 girls

Fiance Has:
Mum and step-dad
Dad and step-mum
Brother and his fiancé and 2 kids
Step Brother and his wife and their two kids
Step Sister and her husband and their girl
Step brother and partner

Then we have:
Our best friends kate and jon as our BM and MOH
My cousin and his partner who we are unbelievably close too
His Aunt and Uncle who we are really close to


Plus a couple of others we are considering inviting. :/ I am hoping to only have approximately 30 guests. The kids are going to be in the wedding but because he has 17 in his immediate family there is absolutely no hope of us having an escape... EVER...

 

[Beast913]

We had a Disney wedding for similar reasons that you did, although my wife's family is much larger than mine.

We had a separate banking account.

Think about a couple of things: How much can you afford to spend? What time of year do you want to have your wedding? (This chances the price in your wedding and can be pretty significant.) What day do you want to have your wedding? (We had ours on Friday, and that saved thousands by itself.)

As noted in my "One Year Later" thread, we had a number of things that cut into our savings, just because life happened to us. That being said, we were still able to afford the Disney wedding and our coordinators did a fantastic job with it.

So really it just depends on your situation. If you can afford a 30K wedding with 30-50 people you're going to have a great party, if you can only afford a little more than the minimum, you still will have a great time, although you probably won't be able to do some of the extras.

 

[alyaki]

I have as my immediate family:
Mum and Dad
one sister who is in a family of four - her, fiancé, 2 girls

Fiance Has:
Mum and step-dad
Dad and step-mum
Brother and his fiancé and 2 kids
Step Brother and his wife and their two kids
Step Sister and her husband and their girl
Step brother and partner

Then we have:
Our best friends kate and jon as our BM and MOH
My cousin and his partner who we are unbelievably close too
His Aunt and Uncle who we are really close to


Plus a couple of others we are considering inviting. :/ I am hoping to only have approximately 30 guests. The kids are going to be in the wedding but because he has 17 in his immediate family there is absolutely no hope of us having an escape... EVER...

Oh! You have pretty much the same size list we do then, and a similar breakdown, though more children, which should lower your price a bit (lucky you!). Definitely look at the BEOs - even the older ones. While you're under the new pricing structure (we are too), the prices actually aren't too dissimilar. If you haven't, get the weddings and honeymoons passporter book - all the pricing info in there is really useful. I can't remember if you've mentioned it anywhere, but what venues are you looking at? Remember, if you don't want wedding pavilion, ceremony cost is a bit lower, but there are things to consider with that as well.

As for how to save/affording it - part of that we did by calculating out normal tax returns and bonuses (my company pretty much guarantees them, provided we're not doing horrible), and by how much we can spend/save monthly outside of that. And we had a longer engagement so that I knew we could have the money - which turned out well, because some other things came up.