Jamie Wolfer says couples blow their budget by booking an expensive venue first, then inflating everything else to match. Start with research instead. City Hall costs around $100, and a full wedding can work for $5,000 if you prioritize vendors and skip the venue trap.
If you want to have a cheaper wedding, book cheaper vendors. And if you don't want to do that, City Hall costs $100. Do that instead.
People don't like hearing this narrative because it requires couples to take ownership of how and where they're spending their money. Because it's perfectly possible to plan a $5,000 wedding in 2026, in 2027. A lot of people when they're planning their wedding just go straight into searching venues and they don't really do a lot of research first. So they get themselves into a pickle of a little term I coined called the venue trap where you sign up for a venue that's too much of your budget and then everything stacks up on top of that, creating a mid-tier or luxury experience that you were not planning for.
