How to Keep Last-Minute Wedding Expenses from Ruining Your Finances

It's your wedding day. You've imagined a perfect day for months, or even years, and everything is coming together ... except it isn't.

Something's wrong. Someone isn't around. Something isn't ready. Something's missing. Something's broken.

On a day when there is so much happening, and your emotions are running wild, an unexpected event can really throw things out of whack.

Quite often, the instinctive reaction is to simply "throw money" at the problem to make it go away. You hire a last-minute replacement or buy a last-minute item to quickly relieve the situation.

The only problem is that kind of last-minute solution is often very expensive. It can be a financial choice made in an emotional state that you end up regretting for years.

Instead of waking up on your wedding day to a crisis that you simply throw money at, then regret later, here are four steps you can take beforehand and on the big day to minimize the financial impact of a last-minute wedding issue.

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Accept that something will go wrong and that's OK. Your wedding will not be perfect. Something will happen that doesn't go exactly as you want it to go. Guess what? It's not the end of the world.

The thing to remember is that your wedding day isn't about perfect flowers or a perfect dress or a perfect meal or anything else. It's about you, the person you're marrying and the people who have gathered to spend that day with you. Everything else is secondary -- extremely secondary.

If a few flowers are wilted, that doesn't mean your marriage is ruined. If the caterer is late, that doesn't mean that your spouse doesn't love you from the bottom of his or her heart. It just means everything isn't perfect. It just means you'll have a cute story to tell someday.

Accept that something won't go right, and let it be. Save it for a story to tell on your anniversary.

Have a "fixer" around. This is often a role filled by a wedding planner, but not everyone has a wedding planner in place. If you aren't hiring a wedding planner, you should at least designate someone close to you who is skilled at handling minor crises easily while keeping their cool. This might be a member of the wedding party, a parent, a sibling, an uncle or a close friend.

Simply approach that person a while before the wedding and ask if they could do you a huge favor in lieu of providing a wedding gift. Ask them to be the fixer for your wedding, so that if something goes wrong, they can handle it for you. Let them in on your full wedding plans, so they're at least familiar with things and can have a copy for their own use. Often, having a calm, cool and collected fixer can make last-minute wedding expenses just vanish.

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Budget for a wedding emergency fund. Add a line to your wedding budget that's simply labeled "emergencies," and assume that you'll have to use that money at the last minute. Figure your emergency fund is 10 percent of the cost of the wedding and plan accordingly.

If you find that you need to use that emergency fund money to handle a last-minute crisis, that's OK. That's what it's meant for. If it turns out that you don't need the money, it can easily be transferred to your real emergency fund once the wedding is over, providing you with a little extra financial cushion in your post-wedding married life.

[See: 7 Signs Your Romantic Partner Is Financially Unstable.]

Simplify your wedding plans. Wedding disasters are often the result of overly complex wedding plans, with lots of people, places and things needed to be in perfect synchronicity in order to come off without a hitch.

Rather than banking on perfection, sit down with a critical eye and examine your wedding plans for the most likely points of failure. Which things require the most people and services and weather to line up exactly right? Is there any way to simplify those specific items or to design a backup plan for them? Thinking about potential problems in advance can eliminate a lot of wedding day emergencies and last-minute wedding expenses.

The big secret to avoiding last-minute expenses? Expect imperfections and plan ahead for them. The more you accept that your wedding day will have some little problems (and maybe even a big problem or two), the more you can plan for those things and the easier (and less expensive) your wedding day will be.

Trent Hamm is the founder of The Simple Dollar, a website covering practical personal finance issues for everyone. He is the author of two books, "The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams" and "365 Ways to Live Cheap." He has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He currently lives in Iowa with his wife and three children.