When Mr. Goodlaff and I started planning, we came up with a budget. About a month later, we realized that our budget was created in fantasy-land and not really constructed using any knowledge whatsoever of what weddings actually cost. Case in point: the actual amount for catering plus venue rental was almost 70% of our initial budget. Oops.
This is not to say that we couldn't have stuck to our (completely unreal) initial budget, but we were hoping to have a certain kind of wedding that we had no hope of achieving without further loosening our purse strings. We were willing to make adjustments to include a lot of those elements that we really wanted in our big day (like a wedding cake, which, had we gone with the original amount, would never have happened). Our new budget isn't a specific number, but is instead a general budget realm, that will eventually cost us less than the base model of a new Honda Civic.
