Ways To Save Money on Your Wedding
May 3, 2009 by Jennifer Chait
Filed under marriage
If you’re getting married this summer – or next even, you can save some cash by making some small adjustments to what goes on in traditional weddings.
Adjust your ring: You don’t really need both engagement rings AND wedding rings. That’s a little bit of overkill. You can also save money by greening your wedding ring, which cuts out things like pricey (and earth-hateful) diamonds and gold.
Adjust the invites: Go paperless which saves on stamps and paper costs – not to mention all those trees. Digital invites are so not lame anymore either. There are some totally amazing digital wedding invitations out there nowadays.
Adjust the cake: Have one small and beautiful cake that’s decorated and decked out in wedding bliss style. THEN have a plain old sheet cake tucked away in a back room at the reception. Cake decorating and extra layers cost more.
Adjust the clothes: You can opt out of totally formal wedding attire or go used or borrowed. Some vintage gowns can be had for a fraction of the cost of a newly made wedding gown, and you’ll have something more unique.
Adjust the setting: For a summer wedding, you may be in luck with clear skies. You can hold a wedding outdoors at a park or some nice friend’s big backyard. You can even (gasp) forget the chair rentals. People can stand if your ceremony is short, or sit on the grass. It’s casual but still special.
Adjust the food: At a reception you don’t need full meals like in the movies. Cake, drink, and some fun snacks and treats are good enough.
Adjust the photos: Among my group of friends I know about two really great picture takers, and one amazing photographer. If you have a camera and at least one or two pals who can shoot, don’t hire a pro. Wedding photo albums are overblown ideas anyhow – I mean, how often do people actually flip through them?
What other ways can you think of that will save money on a wedding?
[image via stock.xchng]
Adjust your decorations! My biggest suggestion is see what decorations you have available for free. Maybe your best friend has gorgeous peony bushes and would love to help, maybe your neighbor got married last year and has about 200 votive candles sitting in a box somewhere. Also, tap into the talents of friends and family. My husband is a photographer and a dj so we’ve been asked to do many weddings for friends and we HIGHLY discount services for our family and friends. Another suggestion is to avoid buying anything labeled “wedding.” Somehow that word gives people the ability to charge twice as much for everything.
Awesome tips for adjusting the decor. Decor is so overrated – I don’t think people even remember that later on anyhow.
My husband and I were married in January, and one of the biggest helps to us was the book “Bridal Bargains”, which completely pays for itself in savings. The biggest part of our expense was, as usual, the reception, because we had a lot of guests that we wanted to be part of our day, and by necessity (for many reasons) our reception was held at mealtime so we opted to really feed them.
We did save money in a number of other ways, though. We were married shortly after Christmas, so we asked our church to leave their decorations (minus the creche) up until after our wedding, so we didn’t have to decorate the sanctuary. We also used silk flowers for bouquets, boutonnieres, and corsages(you really can’t tell the difference in the photos!). We did simple table centerpieces (less than $5 each), and a close family friend made the wedding cake as a gift. Instead of a DJ we had a friend run an iPod for us (one set list for dinner music, the first dance, the cake cutting song, and then self-selected dance/mingle music on shuffle). Wedding favors were Valentine-themed M&M’s (our initials, coincidentally) which came out just in time and matched our colors!
Many of our wedding features were also gifts, which helped a lot (silk flowers, the rental car, the cake). Most people knew we were on a budget, and our registry was reasonably small so people were more than happy to help out with these nontraditional gifts, and they meant a lot to us. We also followed the above advice and had friends from church do our photography. They did a fabulous job at a budget price, and in lieu of an album we received all of their digital photos on DVD to do with as we wish (they also touched up quite a few of them for us with Photoshop).
We also had a frugal honeymoon- the destination was a gift from family, who turned in a timeshare week for us, but we did almost all of our own cooking that week and limited excursions, and stayed completely within budget. The free features of the resort were more than enough most days!
We did decide against paperless invitations, for the sake of the many elderly guests we wanted to host who were unfamiliar with the internet. However, we made a foolish mistake in choosing inexpensive yet classy square invitations- they were also sent with square envelopes, so the postage was almost double. Oww. Brides, be warned.
Oooooooo great tip about the envelope shape! I forgot about that – you can really rack up stamp costs with fancy card shapes. Also, I love your relaxing honeymoon, simple, not overly done, and still fun. I like that sort of thing way better than a fancy vacation trip deal anyhow. Thanks for all the super advice – you’re probably helping out a lot of brides and grooms to be, who’ll see your comment.
i should have more boys…i have 12 girls and 2 boys. it would be so much easier to say “of course i’ll pay for the liquor!!” i’ve been through 4 weddings and another coming up this october. i don’t EVEN want to talk about the cost of these weddings!!!! especially this latest one…we bought the wedding gown (which she absolutely loved) over a year ago. since then she’s lost so much weight that the dress would have to be cut into a third of it’s present state to fit and she no longer likes it. we bought a second gown last week and now have to try to sell this one on ebay or something. even though it was only tried on twice, the tags are off so they won’t take it back.
having lived below the level of frugality/thriftiness my entire life, spending money at this rate is like having oral surgery without so much as an aspirin. fortunately, there was planning ahead not only to pay cash for college (so they didn’t have to take out student loans) but also to throw the wedding of their dreams. i was extremely surprised to find out my 7 adopted children will each get 4 years of college paid for. seeing how as i still have 6 weddings after this one, that was a blessing beyond blessings!!! i’m also considering laying an offer on the table…to any daughter who chooses to elope behind my back…$5,000 cash and you can be my official “favorite child”.
Holy smokes – 12 girls huh?! LOVE the elope idea.
$5000! Holy Toledo, Batman. I had a heavy hors dourves wedding at 7 pm with over 200 candles for a candlelight wedding service for 350 people and spent less than that! And my dress was splurged on for $500. I rented all my candles and had 5 specially made. Our wedding rehearsal was a gift from DH’s small group so all we had to pay for was the food. Our pictures were $1500 and I still came in under that. Maybe I just live in a lower priced area.
I will admit that I didn’t buy a stitch of decorations for the reception hall because by the time you got all the cake and food and chairs in the fellowship hall, you didn’t need any decorations. I even splurged and got about 10 disposable cameras for the reception. You should have seen some of the bathroom photos taken. I still laugh at those!
So my wedding was decked to the nines and still very affordable as we paid for over half ourselves. You are one frugal mommy!
I think it’s completely ridiculous how much people spend on weddings, particularly when they incur debt to have the “perfect” wedding.
My wedding cost $1300. That included the invitations (designed by myself) and postage, church and reception locations, my dress ($99 floor model that I loved and was able to change the neckline myself), veil (made myself), bridesmaid’s apparel, decor (silk flowers, fake ferns on pedestals, and lots of tulle), musicians, photographer, officiant’s fee, thank-you gifts, and reception. My in-laws and their relatives did make a lot of the reception food, which was a great help.
Set a budget and stick to it. You won’t be sorry if you do, but you will almost certainly be sorry if you don’t.
One of the most beautiful weddings we have gone to in a while was a bring your own chair wedding. It was right beside a creek and they just had a small alter. It was fantastic and sweet.
While we did have a sit-down meal for our wedding, we saved money just about everywhere else. My dress was an off-the-rack white prom dress from Sears (and priced half off!), bridesmaid dresses were ten dollar prom dresses from the JC Penny outlet; our cake was a beautiful (and DELICIOUS) three tier cake with matching sheet cake for only a hundred dollars from a local baker… I could go on and on but you get the point!