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Congratulations, you're getting married! The excitement is overwhelming and it should be. Here, out of all the billions of people roaming the planet, you've found one who loves you at the exact same time you love them. You've made the choice of creating a life together and now you're about to begin.

Believe it or not, planning a wedding and paying for it provides you with the opportunity to build skills that can take you through your entire marriage and not just the wedding day. You will have to negotiate with each other as well as with others around you. You will have to learn to deal with in-laws, outside contractors, and people who can interfere in ways you didn't imagine. But the biggest things of all: you will have to have a discussion about money and you are going to get intimate with compromise.

Unless you're planning to stand in the basement of the county clerk's office or jet off to Vegas to have Elvis walk you down the aisle, you're going to plan a wedding ceremony and that means money. Unless you've got disposable income up the wazzu; that means a budget. I'm going to walk you through a practical way to budget for your wedding. I know it works because it's what we used when we were planning our wedding and we're still married so we lived through it.

Step One: Cash or Charge.

You have to decide if you will enter your marriage with wedding debt. This can throw some couples off. It isn't very common for both people to have the same money views. I'm more credit; my husband is more cash. We had to decide what was going to be paid off over time and what would be paid up front. For us, it made no sense to be paying for that one day long after that one day was over. We decided we would pay cash. We didn't share a credit card before our marriage (we still don't) so that was a relatively easy decision. But we also didn't do a lot of down payment, pay it later. Our wedding was on a Saturday, when we left for our honeymoon on Monday; everybody had been paid.

Step Two: Determine what will be shared expenses and what you each will take on your own.

We got one of those wedding planning magazines and went through the checklist. For those things we both wanted - it went into the shared expense column. For those things that one of us wanted and the other didn't care about - it went into our individual column. If there was something we considered a deal breaker and could never have; it went off the list. This is where compromise, trust and integrity plays a role. Not everything

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