It is easy for the costs to spiral out of control. Wedding planners are worse than used car salesmen and lawyers combined. I don't know how many times I heard, "oh, that wasn't included" throughout the process. Something I thought would cost us about $12k ended up costing about $16. I even got a bill afterwards for another $1,000 because they said that we stayed 30 minutes too long. I told them go fuck themselves. Me and my wife halved it, so it wasn't too terribly bad, but I felt like shit spending that much, I couldn't imagine spending over $20k.