Our Wedding Expenses is Within Our Budget!

Hello everyone! It has been a while and our wedding is finally over! Both of us have been upgraded from S to M (not Small to Medium but Single to Married) <-- that's what our JP (Justice of the Peace/solemnizer), Mr. Mike Tam Chee Wah said. The ceremony was entertaining and he was able to alternate between both languages (English and Mandarin) comfortably. We certainly made the right decision to engage him as our JP. One of my brothers was so impressed with him and tried to book him for next year but he was already booked. Do try to book/reserve him in advance!

Our wedding was exceptionally smooth thanks to all our brothers and sisters! CZM was also kind enough to spare me from those torturing gatecrash games and I only had to give a red packet + signed my life/money away to CZM (those contract where my money is hers while her money is still hers, do household chores, etc.). Unfortunately, everything happened so quickly on that day that we barely had time to interact/catch up much with our guests and both of us were feeling slightly unwell (headache, flu and no appetite). However, when it was time to count the ang bao (red packet) money, both of us miraculously "recovered". lol.

I might have blogged about this previously that we did not want to hold a wedding banquet initially but after sounding our parents out, we decided to go ahead with it. After all, we believe that a relationship is not just about us but our family too. Our plan was to keep everything small and simple so we had an initial budget of about $10,000 to $20,000 and I am proud to say we were lucky enough to keep it way below our budget!

Total Expenses: $29,858.63
Total Income: $23,406.00

Overall: -$6,452.63

Expenses

This is a breakdown of the top 10 expenses which accounts for 95.94% of the total expenses. If you think that we spent too much on a specific category/shop and should/could be cut for yours, look no further. Having said that, the full breakdown can be seen at the end of the article. We definitely took a lot more Grab/Comfort than usual because we were rushing/got tired from the preparation.

For those that prefer to look at pie chart instead of numbers.

Income

If we look at the cost of the banquet ($17,878.63) vs the ang bao we received ($23,406.00), we actually made a profit of $5,527.37. I guess this is what people meant when they say they managed to "cover back"? Realistically speaking, I think there is only an extremely slim chance of making a profit from the wedding after including all the relevant expenses and one really should not have such an expectation.

From the above breakdown, it is obvious that most of the money came from my relatives. How it works for us is when CZM's parents requested for X number of tables for their relatives, all those ang baos will go directly to them and it is theirs to keep.

My parents gave us $2,000 for Jin Cha (tea ceremony) and my 3 grandmothers gave us $1,700 in total for the banquet ang bao. These are outliers that really helped a lot. On average, our friends and colleagues gave more than enough for us to cover the cost of the banquet (~$102 per pax) too.

The one takeaway is even if you are not planning to hold a wedding banquet, the tea ceremony is a must! Hahahaha. The tea ceremony would cost you almost nothing (except for the tea set, tea + your mouth/voice) and you get lots of ang baos + some gold.

We were trying to value/include those gold into our income but most of the gold (5/8) that we received did not have any receipt with them. The overall damage would have went down further if we were to add the value of those gold in.

Hope you enjoy our wedding expenses and income breakdown!

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