I’ve been meaning to write about this for… about two years (since I got married) but as always, procrastination has been getting the better of me. Lately though, the Universe has been sending me signs to get on with it. You see, within the last week, I have had wedding conversations with two friends about planning for weddings. And even in my quiet time with Youtube, the algorithm pushes this to my feed.
So yes, I will endeavor to write transparently about the money that went into our wedding (including the honeymoon), and our thoughts around that. Enjoy!
Thoughts around budgeting
In Singapore, I believe it is common knowledge (and hence practice) that wedding guests give gifts of cash to the newly-weds to help defray the cost of the wedding. In addition, some parents might choose to help cover the cost of the bigger ticket items such as the banquet.
That said, when we were budgeting for our wedding, we decided on a sum we could live with assuming:
- We were not going to recoup any of the money.
- We were not going to get any help from our parents or families.
While we knew that the first assumption will probably not be true, budgeting from that perspective allow us to better see the gifts as what they are– gifts to be grateful for, as opposed to something we expected and would be disappointed about not receiving.
I believe the second assumption actually stems from our innate stubbornness and desire to be independent more than anything else. While we feel that there is nothing wrong with asking for or accepting help from parents, it was just our preference not to do so.
Overall Budget
With all the above thoughts in mind, we had come to the agreement that a reasonable amount of money for us to spend on the entire thing would be S$50,000 or S$25,000 per person.
Whether this amount is high or low is totally relative depending on each couple’s circumstance. People who might be getting married later on in their lives (and hence might be more established in their careers) could feel that this is a rather low budget. People who are getting married earlier in life or who simply do not earn a whole lot might find this to be quite a generous budget. To give some perspective, we were both pretty early in our careers when we got married and this was approximately a third of our annual income at the time. This was, obviously steep, but all things considered, we felt it was measured.
Detailed Budget Breakdown
Some of you might also be wondering what we included in the “entire thing”. Here is the list of all the items we included and the amount we budgeted for each item.
| S/N | Item | Projected Cost |
| 1 | Saturday Night Banquet (28 tables) | $33,349.68 |
| 2 | Photography (Including pre-wedding) | $5,000.00 |
| 3 | Hair and Make-Up (Actual Day) | $850.00 |
| 4 | Hair and Make-Up (Pre-wedding) | $450.00 |
| 5 | Bride Dress 1 | $1,000.00 |
| 6 | Bride Dress 2 | $1,000.00 |
| 7 | Bride Dress 3 | $0.00 |
| 8 | Bride Shoes | $1,000.00 |
| 9 | Groom Clothes | $400.00 |
| 10 | Groom Shoes | $100.00 |
| 11 | Wedding Band Bride | $1,364.14 |
| 12 | Wedding Band Groom | $1,635.54 |
| 13 | Flowers | $400.00 |
| 14 | Invitation printing | $150.00 |
| 15 | Room for the Night | $300.00 |
| 16 | Flights to Bali | $2000.00 |
| 17 | Honeymoon Package | $3,000.00 |
| Total | $48,828.96 |
I believe we had relatively generous budgets for the items we chose to spend on. We tried to keep the overall cost of the wedding down by having fewer items instead of having more items which cost less. Like most things in life, it helped to know what was important to us.
Dinner Banquet
We decided that feeding our guests good food was more important to us than the ceiling height of the ballroom. As such, we were much more open to the idea of having the banquet in a restaurant rather than the usual hotel ballrooms. This also happened to be the more affordable option.
Photography
We knew we wanted to choose our photographer and were willing to pay for good photography. On the other hand, we were happy to go without a videographer, allowing us to have a more generous budget for photography.
We decided to go with the same photographer for our pre-wedding and actual day photos. Our pre-wedding photos was pretty much a casual shoot because my “white dress” did not arrive in time for it. More on that later. The pre-wedding shoot costed S$1500 for a 3-hour session. We were allowed to choose thirty for the photographer to edit, and all unedited high resolution photos taken that day were returned to us.
We had to sneak in a photoshoot on the same day as the wedding because of the dress situation (I promise I’ll get to that when I eventually when I talk about the dresses). 8 hours of photography on the actual day set us back $3300. All images edited and returned.
Hair and Make-Up
According to my mum, she could not attend weddings with me for three years after I was born. Apparently, whenever I saw heavily made-up brides, I would wail my head off and be a disgrace to everybody. I do remember being terrified of unnatural looking faces (Chinese Opera make up freaked me out) as a child and while I no longer wail my head off now, it honestly still freaks me out slightly. Therefore, I knew going into the wedding that I wanted a make-up artist who could do the “natural” look which seems to be what most brides want these days. I did some research online, and reached out to a few make-up artists before deciding to go with Ruth who is now a dear friend.
After speaking with Ruth and meeting her for my wedding day trial session (is that what they’re called??), I decided to use her for both the pre-wedding as well as the actual wedding. She ended up giving me a discount for the pre-wedding shoot and I ended up paying S$1255 in total for hair and make-up for both days, including a trial session to make sure that I was happy with the look before the actual day.
DRESSES!
So if you refer to the above breakdown, you can see that I had only budgeted for two dresses. I had always thought that those white dresses were really quite a waste of money because WHEN WILL I EVER WEAR THAT AGAIN? As such, I had intended to get dresses which were wedding appropriate, but also ones which could pass for other occasions in life. However, when my grandma heard of my plan, she gave me some strongly worded advice about how I ought to have a white dress, and that is how the third (white) dress got added to the mix.
My overall wedding dresses hero was local designer Peter Kor. He makes flattering, sensible and mostly affordable (when compared with typical wedding-related dresses) pieces filled with so much character. All the dresses I wore throughout pre-wedding and wedding (aside from the white dress) were by him. The dresses I wore for the pre-wedding shoot were ones I already owned prior to the whole business of the wedding, but I did get two new dresses from him for the wedding. One was an off the shelf cheongsum style dress for the tea ceremony and it was an absolute honour that he agreed to make me one for the dinner. These dresses ended costing a S$250 and S$900 respectively.
White Dress
After grandma’s strongly worded advice, I decided to look around for alternatives to the usual bridal studio type dresses. At the time, I had an upcoming trip to the US and so decided to take the opportunity to check out some of the American brands such as BHLDN. When I looked online, I saw that with a budget of approximately US$600, I could have quite a variety of dresses to choose from.
Unfortunately when I actually tried them, I was not crazy about any of the dresses from the brands I had looked up online. Instead, I ended up falling in love with a pair of ski boots during the trip and ended up blowing most of my wedding dress budget on those instead. Oops. It was admittedly a bit much for ski boots but well honestly price per wear of the boots works out to be much lower than the wedding dress…
On my last day in the US, a friend recommended I check out the Gap-owned bridesmaid dress retailer Weddington Way. It has unfortunately since closed shop but it was there that I eventually found my white dress (which was not quite white). I have fond memories of that afternoon trying on dresses chosen by two fabulous black male retail assistants. And yes, I wore what was technically a bridesmaid dress for my wedding.
Shoes
I must admit that I had quite a generous budget for a new pair of shoes as a wedding seemed like a great excuse to get a new pair of shoes. That said, I did not end up buying any shoes for the wedding and wound up wearing shoes I already had. I would love to be able to say that it was financial prudence but it was actually just leaving it too late and not getting down to it. Oops again.
For the Husband, we ended up borrowing a pair of my dad’s shoes because he did not and still does not own dress shoes. Bonus points for making dad feel good. 😉
The Husband’s Outfit
The Husband had a suit and shirt tailored in Bangkok for the occasion. We had no prior experience, so he ended up going with a friend who has had experience. It ended up costing approximately S$400 for all of it.
Wedding Bands
The wedding bands were something we were happy to spend on as they were supposed to journey with us till the end of our lives. We ended up choosing rings from San Francisco Studio Rebecca Overmann Jewellery. We had decided on and bought the rings before drawing up the budget so the values in the table above were what we paid for the rings– a total of S$2,999.68 for both our rings.
Flowers (Hand bouquet)
I was honestly really tempted to go without a hand bouquet, because that was before I had an appreciation for fresh flowers in any space. I consulted my (male) boss a week before the wedding to ask if he thought the hand bouquets were essential and he said “errrr, I think better have lah!” So I went and contacted Florals by M who made me a really nice bouquet without much input from me. I think all I said was that I would prefer for there to be asymmetry? The bouquet set us back S$180.
Invitation Printing
We had decided early on that the hardcopy invitations would only be for our parents to use. To keep things simple and costs down, we went with the vendor that was part of the banquet package and spent S$150 printing invitations.
Room for the Night
As with many of the above items, we procrastinated and left things pretty late. So we did not actually have a room booked for the night though we budgeted for it. However, one of our friends actually helped us with booking a room as we were busy with the dinner. With some staff discounts available to her, that came up to S$411 for the night at Parkroyal at Pickering’s Executive Suite.
Honeymoon!
I suppose it is normal for most couples to take long and extravagant trips for their honeymoon. After all, like every other day in our lives, it’s once a lifetime right? Well, a combination of factors led us to deciding on Bali, specifically Ubud.
While it was tempting to choose an exotic faraway place for the honeymoon, I had an encounter a few years prior that deterred me from doing so. I was visiting a friend in Tasmania when I met a South African teenager. Upon hearing that my friend and I were from Singapore, he immediately went “Oh! My parents went there for their honeymoon in 1987!” I was amused and almost bewildered that people would travel from South Africa to Singapore for their honeymoon, but when I thought about it, I suppose Singapore probably sounded (or maybe still sounds) pretty exotic in South Africa.
Picture from fullsuitcase.com
This encounter led me to think about whether it was really necessary for us to travel to far and exotic sounding places for the honeymoon. We concluded that above all else, we probably wanted the Honeymoon to be really comfortable without busting the $5000 dollar budget we had in mind.
With $5000 dollars, a couple can just about go on a comfortable European trip with some strategizing about air tickets and accommodation. OR a couple could have a REALLY luxurious four days in Bali without flying budget. Well we ended up choosing the latter as we couldn’t really take too much time off of work and besides, who wouldn’t want the best of global honeymoon destination Bali? The honeymoon ended up costing a total of S$3508.46.
Grand Total
So we are finally at the end of what I used to think was a short list. It no longer feels that short. Well, if you have been following with a calculator, you would have realised by now that we ended up spending S$47,216.28 on the whole getting married thing. There are probably some other costs which were not accounted for such as red packet money for our wedding solemniser, who actually ended up kindly donating the money in our names. That said, the cost could not have gone beyond S$48,000.
While we are on the topic of angbaos, please learn from our mistake of forgetting to prepare angbaos for our friends who helped us out on the day (making up for it by giving them big angbaos for their weddings) and younger family members during the tea ceremony. Remember to budget for this and prepare the angbaos when it’s your turn!
Gratitude
During my speech for the wedding, I spoke about the village it takes to raise a child. During the wedding planning, nobody tells you that the wedding is more about allowing the village to celebrate their achievement of being a part of you that led you to the wedding than it is about you. That was probably my biggest and favourite takeaway from the whole thing. Above all else, it was a night of gratitude for all the people who have nudged us one way or another.
We also had much to be grateful for financially as our village had us covered. Our good friends who walk life with us helped organise an unforgettable after-party that night, refusing to let us pick up the tab. All of it allowed us to escape the whole wedding relatively unscathed financially.
I hope this post might be useful to anybody else about to embark on this wedding planning journey.