The single most important action that must be taken when you are ready to begin planning your wedding is to prepare your wedding budget. Your wedding budget is important because it is impossible to know what you can afford for each part of the wedding if you don't limit yourself to the overall spending costs. For most people, preparing a wedding budget is one of the hardest tasks to be done before the wedding because almost everyone wants to have the nicest and most memorable wedding that they can afford.

Sometimes, parents will not pay for the wedding but will pay for the honeymoon instead. This makes preparing your own wedding budget very important; especially if you are paying for both the wedding and the honeymoon yourself. These days, 4 out of 5 couples pay for their own wedding so it helps to know how your budget should be broken down. When starting to prepare your wedding budget, you will first begin with the overall amount that you can afford to spend. The average wedding today costs around $20,000.

Now you will need to take that starting amount and apply it to an actual separate dollar amount. If you are not good at percentages, you can always utilize the internet and check with the various websites that offer you free or cheap wedding budget calculators that will do it for you. With these calculators, all you have to do is give it the total budget amount and then it will calculate for you how much money in dollars you will have to spend on each aspect of your wedding.

Once you have figured out the dollar amount that you can spend on each aspect of your wedding, you can then begin to create a chart that will itemize the list for you. The following is a list of areas that should be included in your chart: Wedding Reception Venue, Wedding Ceremony Venue, Professional Photographer/Videographer, Catering, Wedding Rings, Wedding Dress, Tuxedo, Music, Flowers, Honeymoon, Miscellaneous, and Decorations.

What this list is meant to show you are the areas you need to give consideration the most to in your planning. You have to make a list of all of the things that you will need to get in order to complete the above list. This is necessary in order to know if what you dream of can even be afforded within your set budget. If it can't, you will have to do any or all of the following: Lower the guest list, Forego some of the services, Lessen the wedding party, or Forget the extras like limos.

Remember starting with the preparation of an objective and realistic wedding budget is the first important action you must take in order to beging the planning stage of your wedding successfully.