Wedding, a money draining activity…

You have finally decided to tie the knot, with the person you want to live with for the rest of your life. Eversince you learned the word wedding, you have thoughts of how your dream wedding would be – perfect, romantic and breath-taking. You begin to be excited and want everything to be grand. But turning your dream wedding into a reality requires deadly and tiresome planning. Not to mention, ever-increasing costs for that perfect celebration.

Oftentimes, couples worked around budgets to achieve realization of their dream weddings. Oftentimes, too, certain expenses are overlooked, therefore, unaccounted resulting in budget deficits. Here are some items we can refer to as “hidden costs” to projects like dream weddings.

Honeymoon expenses. Couples usually leave out honeymoon expenses as a post-wedding project, when in fact it is tied with the wedding itself. As a post-wedding project, budget for honeymoon expenses are usually charged to cash gifts from the wedding day or worse, charged to credit cards. To avoid this, plan your honeymoon early on to avail of possible early-bird discounts from airlines, hotels or resorts. You may also plan to have your honeymoon on an off-peak season to benefit from lower rates during this period.

Marriage license. For a ceremony to take place, you need to pay for the cost of a marriage license. The license fee itself may be reasonable, but you also pay for the associated time spent to secure it, for the seminars prior to its release, for prerequisite documents and for associated taxes or service charges.

Tips. To complete a wedding you avail of the services of various unrelated suppliers. These suppliers perform at their best to provide you with the dream wedding you want. There are industries that have unwritten rules for tips for services rendered. Be very cautious of this, as it may throw you off just after the reception is finished. This may be true for food suppliers, hair and make-up stylists, disc jockeys, wedding planners or limousine drivers.

Service charges. There are some suppliers who do not include service charge in their initial quotes. In our country, it is a practice for food suppliers to declare a per head price for their package, excluding taxes and service charge, which is actually a percentage of the per head price.