Say Yes to Less Stress

But because it comes with all sorts of negative connotations I just want to say this outright: there is nothing wrong with having a budget. In fact, there is something distinctly right about it. Yes, your wedding is important and yes, you want to feel amazing on the day of it. But should you go deep into debt or jeopardise your relationships in order to do it? I think you know the answer.

Weddings can already be stressful without the added burden of money worries, before, during and after. Starting or continuing your connected lives should not have to be plagued with the added anxiety of debt hanging over your heads.

This applies to the dress.

The fact is, there are any number of beautiful wedding dresses in the ‘lower’ end of the budget range that will make you feel absolutely gorgeous. And any number in the upper end, too. If you have the means and want a designer dress – go for it. But if you are working to a budget and, let’s face it, most of us are, don’t go to a salon whose dresses are going to be way above your price range. Do not put yourself through the emotional torture and FOMO that comes with falling in love with a dress that you simply cannot afford (one that an eager consultant is all-too happy to sell you; they are running a business, after all).

Let’s think about this for a second.

If you were going to buy a car, would you just saunter into the nearest showroom and start test-driving Maseratis when you really were looking for an awesome little hatchback to get you where you need to go?

Having said that, there is a point on this where I am willing to contradict myself. After all, there is something about the magic of a wedding dress that can make us lose our minds a little. Given my own somewhat unhealthy obsession with them, believe me – I totally get it.

So, you’re up on the pedestal, your entourage is in tears and you’ve just picked yourself up off the floor after seeing how freaking fantastic you look. You literally can’t believe you are having the experience you always dreamt of.

Then you ask how much the dress costs. Your heart drops. It’s over budget.

Ok. Clearly not ideal. So what do you do if you’re in this situation?

You stop for a hot second and think back to what you were willing to pay for your wedding dress before you walked into the salon and got all gooey over ‘Anastacia’s Dream’. Now let’s look at some facts. If you are, say, looking at a $2000 dollar dress, 10% over budget is going to be $200. If your dress is $8000 then the extra will be $800 which, depending on your situation, may be much more of a significant step up, particularly if you’ve already stretched.

There may be a few other things to take into consideration. Your budget might have been the amount that you agreed with your person-to-be that you would spend on your dress. If that’s the case then you need to ask yourself to what extent you need to respect those limits. If we are talking a couple of hundred dollars over the course of a lifetime of the memory of the way you felt in that special dress, depending on your circumstances, may not be not much in the grand scheme of things from a financial point of view. However, it might be significant on an emotional level if some level of trust is broken.

The honest answer? I don’t know what you should do. But what I do know is that there are a couple of questions you should ask yourself before you make the go/no-go decision.

Before we get to these, however, let’s just go back to something we talked about earlier.

The fact is, for most people, getting married is an emotion-charged experience. It has to be or we just wouldn’t bother doing it. The emotion is also what’s so darn lovely about weddings: being able to express your love for your person, your joy at being together and to share that with your nearest and dearest. For some people being the star of the show and making long-held dreams come true are also up there. The dress plays a large part in ALL of that.

If you are going to buy, let’s say, a washing machine, you are buying it to perform a particular function – to wash your clothes and to do it well.

When you buy a wedding dress it isn’t just the physical dress you are paying for – something to cover your body when you say some vows – it’s also the feeling you get when you put it on and the memories it will help you make, the photos that you will look back on – possibly every day if they are displayed in your house.

When deciding whether to significantly up your budget you need to ask yourself if you really believe you, your day and those memories will be significantly heightened by this – much more expensive – dress as opposed to another in which you also feel beautiful. Again, I don’t know the answer to that. For some of you it will be a resounding and immediate ‘yes’: for others you will feel more peace and calm in sticking to your budget.

So what are some of the practical things to consider if you find yourself in this situation?

1. The base cost of the dress is one thing, but what are you likely to have to pay for alterations? When you factor this into the cost of the dress is the blowout manageable or just too significant to ignore?
2. Who is paying for the dress? Is it you and you alone? Then you know your own financial situation and what paying extra will mean for you. You don’t need to answer the rest of the questions – proceed with your decision. 
3. If someone other than you and your person is paying for your dress, was there an upper limit that you agreed with them? Is it important to you to respect that limit? Will it cause friction between you if you don’t? Will having to pay the extra cause them worry and anxiety or will they willingly agree without requiring emotional blackmail from you? 
4. If someone else is paying for your dress (parents, grandpa, a much-loved-aunty), can you perhaps cover the extra cost yourself?

Avoid the heartbreak in the first place!

Bridies, let’s circumvent ALL of the above by, first, being really careful about which salon you choose to visit and, second, by being really clear with your consultant that you only want to try gowns within your budget.

In my opinion your consultant should be asking you outright from the beginning of an appointment what your budget is. If they don’t ask and you don’t offer the information yourself, they could argue they are within their rights to assume that if you are in their boutique then you know what kind of price range they sit within.

Do your research before you book an appointment. If it isn’t on their website, call them and ask what prices their dresses start at, go to and what they estimate the average price of their gowns to be. The latter is really important because there is likely to be thousands and thousands of dollars between the lower and upper price of dresses in the one salon.

As I have said elsewhere on Say Yes to Less Stress, where you go is the single most important factor in having a great experience of finding your dress, and that includes not feeling a twisting knot in your stomach at having to let a dress go that you can’t afford. Because the fact is, you may find that, in your mind at least, nothing else lives up to it. And that’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

So, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT ‘test drive’ expensive wedding dresses “just to see”.

Know your budget. And if there is a Maserati dress that sits outside that budget? Just don’t try it on.

As a consultant, putting a bride in a position where she is in love with a dress that she simply can’t afford isn’t just uncomfortable for her, it’s uncomfortable for me. Even if she does say ‘yes’, it does dent the joy somewhat as there is a clear element of stress underlying the decision. All brides deserve to feel a deep sense of joy and confidence when they get their ‘YES!’ – both emotional AND financial.