TIKTOK Budget Advice | How to Plan a Wedding for $15k in 2026

Well, hello, lovely humans, and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern-day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Woolford, and I truly believe that wedding planning does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. I kind of picture these episodes like jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner. You get your answers and you go on your merry way, because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today's episode is actually an audio recording of one of my most popular YouTube videos. I don't know about you, but sometimes I just need to sit down and and be able to process through the audio without the distraction of a video. So we decided to take this sweet little nugget and turn it into a podcast for you. I hope you find this helpful, my friends. How to plan a wedding for $15,000 in 2026. Bet. Hi, if you're new here, my name is Jamie Wolfe. I'm your online wedding planner, and I've helped thousands of couples plan their weddings regardless of their budget. And in today's video, we are going to be doing a realistic breakdown of how to plan a $15,000 wedding in 2026, because girly pops, we are here to make sure we are spending our money effectively. And if you don't have a lot of cashola to work with, then I'm your girl. So jump on down there, hit subscribe, and without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. But first, TikTok reactions, because we all love some of those.

Today I'm breaking down the cost of our $15,000 wedding. Our venue ended up being $4,200, and we also had to pay the bartenders and then get our own alcohol. The next big cost was photo and video, and that totaled out to be, I believe, $4,000 total for photo and video. Our food ended up being about $1,300, and that was for food trucks to feed 130 people. Our florist was actually my aunt, so we only spent $600 on all of our flowers. Same with the DJ. The DJ was at my husband's uncle, so we only spent $600 on the DJ. My dress was $800 on Facebook Marketplace. Our rings were $600. Our wedding planner was $1,000, and it was for a 30-day coordinator. Sage's suit was $300. We spent about $300 total on desserts, and that was for a cake, a sheet cake, and cookies. We spent about $600 on alcohol. Our invites were $70. Spent $200 on hotels, and total on decor ended up being about $400, but we got a lot of it back when we sold it.

Sammy Rose out here doing the Lord's work, giving us real numbers with real people counts— guest count. That's the word that we're looking for. Any hootles, this is a completely realistic $15,000 budget. Yes, even in today's economy, it's absolutely possible to do this. So if you missed it, a couple years ago I I did a series on how to plan a wedding for $20K, $15K, $10K, and $5K respectively, but I got a lot of feedback of people being like, okay, but you can't do that in 2026. Another thing you'll see in a lot of these budget breakdown videos is, okay, how many people did you invite though? Like, how many people did you actually have? And then, you know, we've got the brides being like, well, we invited 15 people. That's an elopement. That's not a wedding. So for the purpose of this video and all the videos in this series, I'm going to be using 100 for our guest count, which means it's going to be a traditional wedding with a ceremony, cocktail hour, reception for 100 guests total. We're also going to do our best to incorporate all the traditional elements: food, drinks, dessert, florals, DJ, etc. Now, a couple of rules that we need to implement before we dive into responding to her video specifically, and I will give you a physical, realistic $15K breakdown for 2026. Rule number 1: we need to make sure that you don't fall into the venue trap. What is the venue trap? That's when you go and you look up wedding venues near me and everything that pops up at the top is going to be a professional wedding venue. This is what they do. It's the only thing they They're really good at it, and they're very likely worth every single penny. They also have honed in their craft so well that they know what vendors they want to work with, and they've earned the right to say, we only want to work with these vendors. That's where the venue trap gets you though, especially if you're operating on a lower budget. If you are working with a venue that requires you use a caterer or has a list of preferred caterers, you need to see those numbers first before you sign the dotted line. Because while $3,000 for a venue rental sounds really, really nice, if you're looking at $100 per person per plate, then all all of a sudden your budget starts to run away from you really quickly. So as you are looking for venues, be sure that you are looking at any preferred or required vendors in your food category and in your beverage category. Frankly, in any category, if they're going to require that you choose from a list, it does really streamline your options, but it doesn't give you the ability to DIY or look around for a cost that's a lot more affordable, especially when you are working with a $15,000 budget. Sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to. And you may be sitting there going, you know what, Jamie, actually, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. I would love to be able to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the Master Plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much? You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the Master Plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me, and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out at wolferandco.com TMP. That's wolferandco.com TMP. Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all. And I think it's important to make sure that you're budgeting according to your priorities. Build a budget that works with your vision and you'll be on the path to planning a wedding that you really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to weddingpriorities.com. It's also a huge benefit if they have in-house rentals—tables, chairs, linens, etc.—but it's not outside the realm of possibility to bring those in should you need to. That can be really affordable to do. And also, as we're looking at these locations, I'm going to do my best to highlight ones that have multiple sites where you can have your ceremony, your cocktail hour, and reception. If you can only have one of those, you would have to do something called a room flip, so you'd have to remove people for the cocktail hour. So it can get a little complicated. You could also get married at a local church or synagogue or mosque. That may come free or really inexpensive or ask for a donation to the organization. That could accommodate the option of you just doing reception only or cocktail hour and reception only at one location. But for the simplification of this video, I'm going to try to make sure we've got room and space for all the activities in one location. Also, at $15,000, I feel like I need to say this because remember that video forever ago where this gal was like, you can't plan a wedding for under $40,000 without like DIYing something? Yeah, well, I mean, not completely inaccurate. I didn't enjoy her spirit about it, but I understand where she's coming from. At this price point, you will not be able to hire a professional for every single category that we have on our list, if we still want to make sure we're hitting all the things— photo, dessert, food, drinks, something to sit on, a table to sit at, florals in the middle of the table, some music playing in the background— we're going to have to get a little crafty with it. And by a little crafty, I mean use your family and friends around you or do it yourself. And then last but most certainly not least, the more variety you introduce to your event, the more cost associated. Okay, so if you are trying to keep things more affordable, you want to go for less floral options, less dinner options, go for something that's pasta based with a little bit of protein, or go for something that's rice-based. The second you introduce more proteins or more variety to your meals and/or your drinks and/or your desserts or your florals, that's where the cost can start to add up. So we see a lot of luxury in the variety. We see a lot of opulence when we have 7 different kinds of florals and 4 different kinds of greenery. But if that's not feasible for your budget, really hone in the amount of selections you're making and keep it a lot more streamlined. You'll find it easier to DIY and a lot less expensive to pay for. So let's return back to this gal's budget breakdown. Okay. Did I take notes? I sure did. I sure did. Venue, $4,200. I think that sounds like it was including bartenders. Alcohol was outside of that. Anyways, that's a decent hefty amount for a $15,000 wedding. That's a lot to put towards a venue. She did not mention rentals though, so I'm assuming that that means that tables, chairs, and linens were included in this. That might be a little bit of a big assumption, but she did say it was for 130 people, so we're already kind of hitting that minimum of what we're looking for. For a realistic budget. Uh, photo and video she got for $4,000 combined. That's probably either about $2,000 each, um, or it could be a photo video team that does all of those services in-house as opposed to two separate companies. That again is a pretty hefty chunk of the budget to be spending, um, on the media, the photo and video for your wedding day when you only have $15,000 to work for. But what I love about this, what I love about reviewing TikTok budgets specifically, is it shows you real people making real choices with their money. And so they clearly were like, listen, we want, we value this. This is really important to us, and we're going to adjust our budget accordingly to make that work. Catering, $1,300 for 130 people. That's $10 a head. And she said food trucks, so it would lead me to believe that there's more than one option. That's ridiculously affordable. Like, that's, that's insane. Like, I need, I need you to name names. I need you to name names. Name drop those food trucks that worked for you and that made this happen, okay? Because that's incredible. Floral and DJ were both done by family members, so they paid a small amount. $600 for wholesale florals is a ton. A ton to work with. So to have an aunt be willing to assemble those for you and to be the florist is incredible. DJ, $600. I mean, at that rate, we're definitely paying for more than just renting the equipment. We're paying for time a little bit too, but that's great. Dress was $800. Again, this is a category that I would consider to be a little high for a $15,000 wedding, so I find this one actually kind of surprising. Go you, super proud of you. Rings, $600. I don't consider those ever a part of a wedding budget. Why do I not do that? Because, and you'll see that there are other things that I don't consider as a part of this wedding budget, like transportation. If we're working with $20,000 or $15,000 or $10,000, we're not hiring a vintage car to drive you from place to place. We're not doing that. That's not on my list. Okay. Um, and I also do my best to give guidance and feedback on the things that I normally help couples plan. So rings, for the most part, especially engagement ring, that's already spent, that's already paid for. Um, when it comes to wedding bands, I don't consider that a part of the wedding budget because that isn't necessary for for your wedding event to happen. You can have a wedding day without a wedding band. Plus, I don't really help couples find their wedding bands anyway, so I try to keep the purview of what I share in these videos to what I know and what I can comment on. So if we're going to include $600 for that, great. If not, that's going towards something else in our $15K budget. Okay, coordinator, $1,000, that seems logical. Suit, $300, normal. Dessert, $300 for a cutting cake, a sheet cake, and cookies. Okay, so remember what I said about variety? Clearly we found a way to work some variety in there for $300. Alcohol, $600. That's honestly a little bit high for this as well. Like, she's just killing this. This is insane. Invitation, $70. This is— go, I love that for her. Hotel, again, I would not have included that as a part of the wedding budget because that's not a part of the wedding event itself, but of course she can include it here. It's her budget, she could do whatever she wants. Plus, her wedding's over, who cares? And then decor, $400. We're talking tea light candles, uh, we're talking the little votive glass holders that they go into, you can really pull off a lot for $400. I have not done the math on this. I should probably do the math just to confirm that we're near $15K real quick before we move on. Holy smokes. Yeah, $14,970. She did the dang thing. That's insane. And she had extra things in there, probably, let's see, at least $800 of items in there that I would have not typically included in a wedding budget. Uh, but she did and she did great. So if, if we were following my budget guidelines, which again, we will do a $15K budget breakdown in just a moment,, she'd be a lot closer to $14,000 in this scenario, which is crazy. Now I know what you're thinking, okay, well when did she post that video? Okay, but it's going to be different because vendors raise their prices every single year. If you are watching the series in order, I did the $20K video first and there likely will be repeat information in that video and all the other videos of this series simply because budget weddings follow a trend or a pattern. And so I will definitely be saying the same things in a lot of these videos. What a lot of people say is, well, you better book now because the vendors are going to raise their prices and they're going to keep raising them as they get more experience, as time goes on, as inflation rises. Yes, sure, that is absolutely true. What they don't take into account is all of the new vendors that enter in onto the scene every single year. So while you see these venues, these prestigious wedding venues, raising their costs year over year, what you're not paying attention to, or what you might not be seeing, is all of the new venues that are entering onto the scene and need to build up their galleries or unique locations that host weddings. But that's that's not the main thing that they do. So if we can get our mentality outside of the venue trap and really kind of rework the foundation of what this wedding looks like, you're not going to find that you will be priced out of finding a wedding venue or wedding vendors that suit a lot of these categories. Again, at $15K, you will have to DIY some stuff. It's just going to have to happen that way. You're going to have to have some family members or friends that are going to help out. It's not going to be a perfect Cinderella story. There's going to be a lot of work involved, but you either have the time, or you have the money. And so in a situation like this, we're going to treat time as the commodity that we have more of. And if you don't have enough of that, you're going to have to draw on family members and friends to help offset that. Now we're gonna go ahead and share a $15,000 budget breakdown from the master plan, which if you need wedding planning assistance, it's $29 a month. You guys, I cannot recommend joining this enough. It's the most inexpensive professional wedding planning service you're gonna find anywhere. I'm live with these couples once a month helping them plan their weddings, doing realistic budget breakdowns, helping them put together their timelines. On top of all the information that I give you on how to plan your wedding as effectively as possible. And this is one of the things that's included in it. So I've put in $15K as the budget, and we're gonna go ahead and see what that looks like as a thorough wedding estimate, like a thorough breakdown. One thing that you'll know about the difference between this budget and most of the budgets that you see online is a lot of the budgets online will lump together catering and venue services, and that's because most of the time they're working with venues that come with preferred or required caterers. But if we're really going to make our money work for us, we have to be able to break that down differently. So that's one thing that we have here in the master plan that I determined to make happen. Okay, so we have the venue at 19%, which brings us to $2,850. The coordinator at $750, catering at $2,250, drinks $450, dessert $450, rentals $750, photo $1,350, video $1,350, florals $1,350, DJ $600, stationery $450, apparel $750, hair and makeup $150, and a miscellaneous budget of 10%, which would be $1,500. Before we jump into the overall breakdown of this specifically with receipts and locations from a metropolitan area using 2026 dates. Let's talk about the miscellaneous category real quick. Most couples that I work with on a lower budget, on the lower end of things, want to do away with this miscellaneous category, and I highly encourage that you don't because you will have items that pop up that you go, okay, I wasn't anticipating spending this money, so let's just, let's just throw some money at it. Oh good, I'm glad we have this. Or I thought I was going to DIY this, but now I don't want to. Or my taste changed and I want to have a little bit more wiggle room, or we found the perfect caterer but it's going to cost us a little bit more. This happens. This is very normal, especially when it comes to budget weddings, because you have a finite amount of money to work with. So I want to make sure that there's a little bit set aside for if and or when these scenarios pop up. If you don't want to set aside that money and you want to squish that into another category, by all means feel free to. But just know that there will be things that pop up along the way that change what your overall budget looks like. Budgets are flexible. They are not sedentary. There's a lot of movement that happens with them. So you will have things that pop up that you either decide that you want to do or you weren't anticipating that you need some funding for. So whether you pull that from your monthly budget or from a miscellaneous category that you've set aside, just know that this is very, very frequently used. In fact, I cannot think of a single couple I've ever worked with that has not touched their miscellaneous budget. So venue, 19%, puts us at $2,850. This is going to put us in a much lower echelon, obviously, than a lot of the events that we talked about because we kind of have like the, if you go with a traditional wedding venue, you're looking at like a $40K minimum. It's just kind of, that feels like the natural number when you're looking at this, maybe $30K, right? But the second you start incorporating preferred and/or required vendors, you're going to kind of lock yourself into a rate of $35K, $40K, $45K, if not $100K+. It all kind of starts with the selection of the venue specifically. So when we're talking about a $2,850 venue, We're talking about the location alone. No tables, no chairs, no required caterers, nothing. It's just the location itself, ideally with a place for a ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception. So at this rate for a venue, we're kind of riding that line of peer space versus, uh, like publicly owned spaces, which again, I have to come up with a better term for this. But a lot of times what couples don't know is that there are very affordable locations in your home state, in your home county, and in your city. There's a lot of government-owned or public property that you can get married on for a very, very inexpensive rate. For example, I'm close to the DFW— well, close to— I'm under 2 hours away from, or about 2 hours away from the DFW area, which by the way, if you're planning a budget wedding, broaden your scope a little bit. If you are hellbound and determined to keep it in your hometown and you don't have flexibility of moving these around within like an hour and a half or 2-hour radius, you are kind of— you are definitely limiting things. Okay, so if you can, try to broaden that search just a little bit. Maybe incorporate a large city, something along those lines, to where you find, uh, you have a couple more options to work with. Most vendors are very comfortable traveling about an hour and a half to your event without charging travel fees, so don't be concerned about that. You can source someone from a little bit further away to just broaden that pool a little bit. Okay, so I found Winfrey Point, which technically right now as I'm recording this is under— it's, it's closed for renovations, but they do include prices online, and the renovations are said to be done in April of 2025. So I like— I just— do you notice how I'm like trying to treat this like a scientific scientific experiment. I don't want anyone picking apart this number because it's currently closed. I spent 60 seconds on this. It was not complicated. Winfrey Point, they have fees per hour for resident and for non-resident. They also have special event lease fees that I don't know if that applies. An application processing fee, not sure how that applies or if that's built into the cost. And then an alcohol permit could be $250 or $200. Again, I can't quite tell. The spreadsheet on this is a little bit not best done. But for Winfrey Point, it's available any day of the week. But let's say we wanted to do a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday event. We're looking at $400 for a resident fee per hour or $500 for a non-resident fee per hour. We tend to see weddings need about 9 hours of rental time. 10 would be great, but 9 makes sense. We usually have 2 hours of setup for professional vendors on the front end of things, um, a 6-hour event, and then 1 hour of teardown at the tail end. So that gives us a total of 9 hours. I actually ended up being a lot more expensive than I thought it was gonna be. Okay, in my defense, when I first looked this up, it was, uh, $200 for a resident and $240 for a non-resident. That was the first fee structure that they had updated, and then I looked a little bit further and they had a new, more updated fee structure. Uh, so if we're going with their current fee structure, the updated one, we're looking at $4,500 for the rental cost. That does not include the deposit, so this would be a $5,000 location. So look at me already kind of eating my own words. But to be fair, again, I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking at this. But another one of my favorite resources would be something like Peerspace. There's a couple really good options that I see here. I'm going to use a little bit of overlap from the previous $20K video, but we've got one in the DFW area that's $2,100 for a 9-hour rental for— on May 30th of 2026. We've got another location that's at $4,200. That's probably a little bit steeper than we would want in this particular scenario, especially when we're trying to keep it to what, $2,800? Yeah, here's one at $3,800, so we're $1,000 over our estimated amount for our venue, but this is a rustic event location on 15 acres. Okay, so I will show you where all this other money can come from and how we can make these numbers work. Here's another one for $2,244. It is a singular location and it does not have the option for a ceremony or cocktail hour to happen in this space, but it's 2,000 square feet, so there is a lot that you can do in this location. And then finally, they list this technically for 65 people. It's 1,000 square feet. You could probably do buffet-style dinner for more like 80 in here. So again, I'm trying to keep the numbers close to 100, but we're looking at $1,122 for a 9-hour rental on May 30th, 2026. I might have spent 20 minutes looking at this. I didn't go really hard on it. I just wanted to have valid numbers to bring to you. So the $2,800 might be— as you can see, we're kind of on that cusp of like, we might need to bump a little bit more into this specifically, like we saw in that video example, in that TikTok, to, to make it a little bit more accommodating, right? But it's not outside the realm of possibility. The next on our list, we have a wedding coordinator for $750. 50. You're probably not going to find a day of coordinator at this cost or around this cost. Honestly, anything under $20K, I typically recommend couples just kind of skip a coordinator altogether. You could probably find one for as cheap as $500. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but if you really would like to have one present on your wedding day, you can find someone that could be that affordable. They're going to be relatively new to the industry and they haven't done this for a super long time, but that— if that's a risk that you're willing to take, what they lack in experience they will make up for and enthusiasm and affordability. Okay. But if we get rid of that category and then put that $750 with our venue, all of a sudden we have a lot more wiggle room to work with up there. Right? So this is all about making personal preferences and choices to kind of scoot things around to make this work. And this is honestly why I loved reviewing that gal's budget first, because I wouldn't have necessarily made the same exact choices or made the same recommendations, but you can see she very clearly pulled off a $15K budget and still was able to prioritize what she wanted to. So it's all about shifting these numbers. These are just recommendations from my experience as a a pro. Catering, $2,250. That would be $22.50 per person. Great options for this would be something called drop catering. While you might be able to find a taco truck that can do it for $10 a person, $15 a person, that's pretty difficult to pull off. Instead, what you kind of want to do in a situation like this is go for drop catering, which is where you call into a local restaurant. It can be a chain, it can be a mom-and-pop location. The more grain-based or starch- space that you can keep this, the more affordable it's gonna be. So if you have a pasta bar, great. If you can DIY your salad bar, fantastic. That's really, really inexpensive and easy to throw together and still feels like a very full experience. I still would recommend having some sort of protein available for dinner, but again, remember, we're keeping the variety low, we're keeping it really simple. So the examples that I shared in the last video, we are literally going to reuse here just for a point of reference. So for Chipotle, you can get a single protein option, a double protein option, or a triple protein option at $10.10, $12.65, or $15.20 respectively. Now this of course does not include pickup, drop-off— this would be a family member or friend doing that for you. It also doesn't include chafing dishes, perhaps renting those to keep things at temperature and keep them warm. So we have a little bit of wiggle room in our budget there specifically, but if we're looking Looking at $22.50 a person, there might even be some room here to hire a service staff to come in and help with the setup. Or if you don't have a family member or a friend that's available to go pick this up for you, if you're in an area that has TaskRabbit, this is absolutely something they can do for you. And it does obviously require having someone to go pick this up for you and paying them for their time, but you could push your delivery time of the catering a little bit later if it's not someone who's at your event. Event. So the need to keep the temperature just perfect lessens just slightly. Now, I still think it's a good idea to make sure you have chafing dishes or warming mats or something of those. In fact, I just bought some off of Amazon for the holidays this last season, and they worked surprisingly well. So if you've been considering grabbing some of those, this could be the opportunity for that. Okay, but even compiling food for 100 people at their most expensive option without taxes or anything like that is $1,520. Through Chipotle. The other option that I talked about but didn't show was, um, In-N-Out. In-N-Out food trucks. I am a Southern California girly, okay? So I will die on this hill. I love In-N-Out. I love their food trucks. I do wish they could do fries on the food truck, but listen, I'm not here to complain, okay? I just love me a good cheeseburger animal style, and I will die on that hill. So opting again for a May 2026 date for 100 people, 2 hours of service, getting burgers and chips— although if you're trying to be really more affordable about this, I would recommend doing the chips yourself or having those off to the side. Someone can go to Costco and get them for a much more affordable rate. This is— you're paying for convenience here. They estimate you're going to be serving 221 burgers, which means people are eating 2 burgers each, like most people, which is a lot. Which brings the total cost to about $3,500. That's $35 per person. So again, if we can kind of work this number a little bit, DIY some of the elements, add in a salad bar to help fill people up, then the main course would be their burger. This does take a little bit longer to serve something like this, but we are still looking at numbers that are not outside the realm of possibility. In fact, if we lessen the time down to an hour and a half and do burgers only, that puts our cost down to $3,250, and they said they're going to serve a total of 277 burgers. So they know their craft better than I do. I still think that's a lot of burgers for a situation like this. Anyways, that is a feasible number. We are a little bit— we're definitely— okay, we're like $1,000 over what we anticipated. Complicated, but I just want to show you with a very, very minimal amount of research how quickly we can put together numbers. Chick-fil-A, here's another great one. They do catering, which is awesome. What I did find out though is that I ran into like a $1,000 maximum. It could be just the location that I'm using, but they've got a grilled chicken bundle at $7.70 per person. They've got Chick-fil-A nuggets that could be at about $6 per person depending on all the other offerings you have with it. Again, chicken strips at $62.50 that could serve 8 to 25 people. I don't know where they're coming up with these numbers. This is where it'd be a really good idea to have a service staff person there, which you can get for $25 to $35 per hour to do the serving for you to help kind of moderate how much people are serving themselves because they could see an unattended amount of chicken strips and just pile it onto their plates. So we just want to make sure that there's a little bit of monitoring happening here so there's enough for everybody. But they even have like a garden salad tray that could serve 5 to 10 people. You grab 5 of those, you have a couple different dressings that you can toss on top or set off to the side, mac and cheese, cheese tray. Lots of different things that you can do here. And if you don't have any of these offerings near you, you do also have the option of, again, a mom-and-pop catering location that could keep things pretty affordable. So I tried to find things that are pretty, pretty national other than In-N-Out. I understand it's not national, but I had to include it in there because I love them so much. Okay, back to our numbers. $450 for drinks. This would include non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, by away. I do recommend that if you can have 2 to 3 drink dispensers that you can purchase or rent, have water, iced tea, and lemonade. Great. That's going to be a huge crowd pleaser for any of your NABEV people. That's non-alcoholic beverages for those not in the industry. Okay. And then when it comes to your bar, I do recommend when possible— again, I'm going to be repeating myself from the previous video— hiring a licensed bartender to serve. Why is this important? Well, here's something I didn't highlight in the last video is non-professional bartenders don't know how heavy to for. They just, they don't know, and they'll just look, look, look, look, look, look the whole— that, like, you'll have half the bottle in a singular glass. So I do recommend either coaching your person who's running your bar for you or having a bartender, a professional bartender, run your bar for you. One, so they can pour accordingly, and two, so they can keep an eye on things for you. But at $450, we're pretty much sitting around where you kind of want to be for having drinks for 100 guests for your entire event. So that's usually 1 drink per guest per hour, which according to the Bedmo calculator gives us about 600 drinks. So we're looking at about 60 bottles of wine and 56 packs of beer. So if we get a little creative, or if we go for, you know, Coors Banquet instead of a custom craft brew from your favorite brewery down the street, these numbers are a lot more affordable and a lot more logical. So you can still offer alcohol at your event. One thing while we're talking about alcohol specifically that I want to note is, um, when I was looking through Peerspace, I clicked the filter of allowing outside food, beverage, and alcohol specifically. So no alcohol limitations whatsoever. Again, this is why I love peer spaces, because you can really customize what you're looking for and the experience you're looking for and get something that works with your budget in, in most scenarios, in most cases. Again, depending on the range within which you're looking. And again, like we saw with that one location in the Dallas area, they have an alcohol permit. I don't see any limitations for hard alcohol or champagne, but sometimes you might run into that. Dessert at $4.50. I mean, the gal we just watched had a cutting cake, a sheet cake, cookies for $300. If you go to Costco, if you go to Sam's Club, if you go to Trader Joe's, you can go just sweep your arm across the, you know, the frozen food section, and they put all the fun little like snacky desserts up there. Just chuck them all into your cart. It's going to be so much more affordable than you think. This will still require setup day of, tables, chairs, linens for all of those desserts to go on top of. Again, we're not naive. We understand that doing a wedding at this this price point is going to cost more of our time than it is of our money. But only one of these is finite, right? And if we're trying to make this budget work, then we're going to have to get creative with what we're doing with our time or with what our family members and friends are doing. But if you stuck to just a cookie table and all you got were a bunch of cookies from Costco, do you have any idea how affordable that would be? Astronomically affordable. If you want to get a little cutesy with it, a little creative with it, you can do cookies and milk and have like designated pitchers with milk and disposable cups. And so people can go serve themselves and have a cutie little dessert moment that's slightly outside of the norm but actually way more affordable than having cake for 100 guests. Rentals, $750. I do have the same numbers that we used from the last video, so forgive me, there's going to be a little repetition here, but I didn't necessarily feel the need to reinvent the wheel. Uh, we're looking at garden chairs for, um, 100 guests at $3.50 a person. So that's the white padded ones, not the Samsonite ones. The banquet tables, we're looking at 8-footers, which can comfortably seat 8, maybe up to 10. I have 12 of those on here. And then tablecloths, floor-length tablecloths, so the 90 by 156, for a total of, including setup for table, chair, and linens for all of them, is $697. So what we do not see here are delivery and/or pickup fees. There's going to be a little bit more associated with that, and taxes as as well, and there might be a service charge, etc. So this is not a perfect estimation, but it's a good enough number to see, okay, I inputted the wedding dates. I think in this one is I did April for some reason, but it's 2026 numbers and we're not sacrificing our tablecloths, okay? We're not having our ankles of our table show because we— that's a pet peeve of mine, okay? If you want to save money, do it, but let's find other ways, not a mini skirt on your table. This does not include a dessert table. This does not include a buffet table. This does not include a cards and gifts Oftentimes venues will come with like a little miscellaneous sideboard that you can use for this kind of thing, so that could be covered for your cards and gifts. Buffet tables are obviously going to be a little bit extra, so you could be looking at— and logically speaking, I do typically say it's about rentals are about $10 per person— $1,000 would be more feasible in this particular category if you wanted to make sure you're hitting all the categories that you need to hit. And then at this rate, rentals— we're not renting plates, we're not renting dishware, we're not renting flatware, we're going disposable if we can get it through the caterer, we're getting it through the caterer. If you want to elevate it a little bit, we've literally done a cost comparison of renting plates versus like the fancy plastic disposable plates. They equal out to about 45 to 55 cents per plate for both of them. The bigger issue with having the rented items is the delivery and the pickup and then the cleaning fee that may be associated with that, as well as the busing of the tables. At least with the disposable options, you can pick those up and throw them away afterwards. You will still need a family member or friend to do that if you're not hiring a service staff, because most guests are not going to assume to clean up the tabletops. That's a lot of— a lot of couples will be like, oh, don't worry, our guests will clean it up. Will they? I'm here to tell you they probably are not going to. Respectfully, you think they will, but unless you're asking them to, they don't anticipate coming to a wedding to do something like that. So just like a little— that's a little— that's a little nugget for you to tuck away. Okay, photo and video, both of them are at 9%. $1.50, so that's $13.50 apiece. Any of the budget videos we're gonna do moving forward, I'm gonna say the same thing. I said this in the last one, we're gonna probably want to remove videography from our list. That gives us an additional $1,350 to work with that we can add to photography, that we can add to catering should we want to go with the In-N-Out food truck instead of just, you know, Chipotle or a local mom-and-pop location. Also, $1,300 is a really, really difficult sell, is a really really difficult find when it comes to photography. You could probably find someone to do it. In fact, when you're working at a budget of this magnitude or this level, I highly recommend you join a Facebook group because that's going to be your wedding Google. In fact, at any budget, I recommend joining a Facebook group because you can jump in there and say, hey, here's my budget, here's what I'm looking for, here's the area that I'm in, and here's the day that we're getting married. Are there any photographers available in this group that meet this criteria? Are you kidding me? So you can list out your exact specifications of what you're looking for, then the vendors just come to you. It's so much cheaper than Google, and it's so much faster too. So this would be a scenario where I would say, let's bump that budget up. Let's see if we can get it to at least $1,500, but ideally I'd like to see you at $2,000 for photography, because that ensures you're working with someone who's been doing this a little bit longer, or at least, you know, has been doing this for long enough to have a portfolio built out that knows how to help you run your wedding day. Especially if you're not working with a coordinator, at this price point, you want to make sure you're working with a photographer that knows what to do and how to make sure they're getting through your photos as swiftly as possible. Possible. So if we get rid of video, we can make photo a little bit bigger, give us a little bit more wiggle room in there, and then you can get someone who has some more experience. Florals at $1,350, you're not finding a single florist that's going to do it at this cost. I've done florals, I think I charged— I can't remember if I charged the couple $1,200 or $1,400, and I made like $100 off of it myself because the cost of wholesale florals is a lot. It's super expensive. So florists won't get any money for their time in lot of scenarios because the sheer variety— remember we talked about this earlier— the sheer variety of things that they're ordering, or different types of florals or different types of greenery, really isn't cost-effective. So when we're looking at this, I would say you could probably DIY your florals and get all of them wholesale for $200, $300, $400, $500, $600 like this gal did as well. And she had a pretty decent variety going on in her video if you are willing to DIY them. If you're not sure where you land on the DIY scale of florals. I do have a floral quiz. I'll go ahead and link it right here for you. But you're not going to find a professional that's going to do it at this cost. So you will have to get creative with this. So either simplify your expectations. Let's go to Dollar Tree or Dollar General. Let's get those hurricanes that they have for like, what, $1.25? Let's get some floating candles or some pillar candles in those bad boys. And let's get some Italian ruscus and just lay it gently on the tables to kind of fill in the space space of where a centerpiece might be. And then we're drastically reducing your overall floral cost and your DIY efforts that you need to be putting into this. So with $1,350 for that category, I would say honestly cut that in half and put the other half towards something else. And with $700, you have so much money to work with when it comes to florals. You can even probably very likely pre-buy your bouquet and bridesmaid bouquets and boutonnieres from a lot of locations like Fifty Flowers, etc., that will send you pre-made items. So you don't have to DIY your personal arrangements, but you could instead put your DIY efforts into your centerpieces. DJ, $600. While we love the gal's video from earlier, most people don't have an uncle that can DJ their event for $600. So your option here is bump up your price point to $800 to $1,000 and find a professional in your area. And by area, again, I mean a radius of like an hour and a half to 2 hours. Or bump that down and rent speakers from your local Guitar Center or your local music store. A lot of times they will have this as an option. You'll need a set of speakers for your ceremony, a single speaker likely for your cocktail hour, and then a set of speakers for your reception. Again, if we're DIYing, someone's got to set this up, someone's got to tear it down, someone's got to be moving some things around. You can take your speakers from your ceremony location and put them at your reception location and just keep the solitary speaker in the cocktail hour space should you want to. You could also have a family member or friend play guitar just acoustically during that time, so you could save a little bit of money there if you have someone is willing to do that or talented enough or both. But renting speakers, you're probably looking at the $300 range. I haven't looked at the price of this within like the last 12 months, so I'm not quite sure where that lands cost-wise. But between that and a Spotify playlist that will fade in between the songs, you will still have a very DJ-like experience. You'll just need to likely have someone be available to make announcements. So if you can, make sure you add a microphone onto that rental so you can have a family member or friend do the emceeing for you. DJs are the unsung heroes of a wedding. Day. I will die on this hill. I love them so very much. They are worth every single penny, especially if you're not having a coordinator. Having a good DJ who knows how to read the room and handle the flow of your event is very, very important. So if you can and you're willing, bump more into this budget to see if you can get a professional into this category so you have one less thing to worry about. Because remember, you're probably not going to find a coordinator at the rate we discussed here unless you get a little bit creative. So if you can have a coordinator, and make sure to, if possible, invest in a DJ instead, or as well. Stationery, $450. We're not doing that. Okay? We are finding a free template online and we're getting them printed at our local FedEx, Kinko's. We're getting them printed through Canva. If we feel like we want to add a little ribbon or a little belly band moment, you can DIY them and make them a lot more fun. But even if you send out 100 invitations at $4.50 a pop, that's pretty expensive, which by the way, you're not going to send out 100 invitations. Invitations, okay, with 100 guests. You're probably going to send out about half, if not maybe 3/4 of that, because most people are coming in pairs at a minimum. So don't order 100 invitations because you have 100 guests. Go through and do the effort of counting the households, please, because I've known many a couple to accidentally over-order when it comes to their invitations, and I definitely do not want that being your story. All right, so we're getting crafty with this. Canva saves so many tushes when it comes to DIY events. There are also great free templates online that you can get and then dress it up accordingly should you want to have a very curated and/or tactile experience for your guests with this specifically. Apparel, $750. I mean, she had an $800 dress and her husband had a $300 suit. Like, that's insane. That's a lot. That's super great. I'm so glad that they were able to pull this off. And obviously she said her invites were only $70, so like, there's, there's a lot of wiggle room that we could do I would say apparel at $750, you would probably be looking at buying a dress for about $300 with about $200 worth of alterations. You're looking for a suit rental at about $250. $200 to $300 tends to be a good range. So that should be sufficient to cover the basics of your attire, but you might not be able to cover your wedding shoes or your wedding jewelry or your wedding accessories. So this is why that miscellaneous budget can come in handy. Handy, right? If you can't quite find the right thing at this price point, you are likely buying a used off-the-rack or sample dress. That could be online, that could be, um, in-store, that could be at a sample sale. But you're very likely not going the traditional dress buying experience. You simply don't have the room for it. Or if you do, you're going to be cutting drastically in other areas to make that work. Hair and makeup for $150— you could probably pick one. You could pick either hair or makeup, and even then it probably wouldn't include a tip. And a lot of hair and makeup artists charge a decent amount more than that. So this would be a good category in this budget range to consider either doing it yourself or having a family member or friend do it, or someone who's really gifted at this. Just be sure to practice, especially if you have never done event makeup of this magnitude or you're not quite sure what you want your face to look like. You just want to make sure that you've got options that you feel confident and comfortable with. Another thing that you can do is you can go to a local salon and get a blowout done., or have your hair styled there instead of having the artist come to you. We pay for the luxury of that experience. You can go to a local mall or location like that, uh, and have your makeup done on your wedding day. Again, we're missing out on the luxury of having someone come to you, but we're also not paying the luxury fee that comes associated with that. I cannot tell you how much it costs to get your hair done at your local salon or by a local makeup artist if you go see them at a location like Sephora or Ulta, etc. But I do know that it's going to be a lot less than having an artist come to you. It's going to change the vibe and the feeling of your wedding morning for sure. But if you don't want to DIY it, or you can't, or you don't have a family member that can, this could be an affordable option to put in here instead. Okay, so that's what we have for today's video, guys. A realistic $15K budget breakdown with receipts for a wedding in 2026. It's absolutely possible. It is. You can host 100 people and serve them food and have alcohol and and have desserts and have a dance floor and have a photographer still completely feasible for $15K in this day and age. I know money is not going as far as we want it to right now. I know the economy is not what we want it to be right now. I know a lot of people are struggling, and that's why I make these videos, and that's why I have the master plan. Because after working in the industry for 10 years, my pricing is probably a little, a little high for someone to hire me in this capacity. But that's why we do this. That's why I make these videos. That's why we have the course. That's why I offer these online calls. That's why we do what we do, because when my husband and I got married, we had nothing. I think we spent— I know with— I can't remember if we spent $8,000 or $8,500. We had nothing. So I get it and I understand, and I want to make sure we are always having opportunities to help budget couples plan one of the best days of their life, because you deserve to have a stress-free wedding day. How about you? What's your budget going to be? Are you having a $15K budget wedding, or are you just here because you're curious to see if we can actually pull it off? And, uh, we did. We did. If you haven't done so already, jump on down there, like the video because you like the video, and subscribe to this channel for more tips and tricks from Modern Day Bride. And go encourage the heck out of each other in comments while you're down there. Okay, and until next week, bye guys! If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the Master Plan community over at themasterplanwed.com. I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a 5-star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time, bye guys!