Nigerian-American Weddings

In our previous post here , we introduced the idea of your wedding budget. We mentioned how that is the premiere step in your wedding planning process.  The next question really is, so how do I set a budget? Here are the steps we suggest: 1. Get together with your future spouse and decide how you are paying for this wedding Is family going to help? Are you a military spouse and you get some sort of aid that way? Is someone else going to sponsor it? And make sure all of this is 'money-for-hand' and not all hearsay and empty promises. If you are like the rest of us and you are solely responsible for moving this wedding ship along then move on to step 2.  2. Figure out how much savings you have. Yes, you both plan on marrying each other and eventually you will need to talk money so might as well start now. Both of you need to calculate how much money you each have in liquid savings in total today and potentially by wedding day. Then list out your immediate future plans (wedding, ...

We touched on it briefly on our introduction post but before anything else is done, it's important to have the money talk and... SET A BUDGET! Odds are very high that you will go a little bit above this budget at the end of the day ( notice how I didn't say 'lower' because that rarely ever happens ). However, when you know what your mark is, even when you are off from the mark you are less likely to be tremendously off.  Then arises the question of how much should I budget? How much does a typical Nigerian wedding in the abroad cost? How much is a Nigerian/African wedding in my American city? A good place to start honestly is to google the typical cost of weddings around you and tack on an extra $10,000. WAIT! Don't click out just yet o haba! The truth is that there's a wide range of possibilities. If you want a BellaNaija wedding, then maybe even go ahead and double the typical wedding budget for your city.  This is because those budgets you see are not create...

Organizing a Nigerian wedding in "the abroad" is a particularly interesting and unique struggle. For some, you may have spent a good part of your life looking at pictures from BellaNaija online and admiring different outfits and styles. You may also have attended (in real life or via instagram) the weddings of your friends or celebrity friends ( I know I'm not the only one that was live at Banky and Adesua's wedding from my living room sofa ). All these things lead you to have certain expectations of how you would want your own wedding to go. Then on the flip side there is the issue of your pocket. You might have a decent job and earning stream and you may think to yourself "just how expensive can this thing possibly be?". Well you are in for a surprise aren't you? The average cost of a wedding in most American cities (not including special ones like NYC, LA, etc.) is about $31,000. If you are like me and live in Houston, TX then we are just a...