It can seem quite daunting to stick to a wedding budget as you go through the planning process. However, if you keep your emotions in check you can save yourself a lot of money when it comes to your wedding day. Remember this mantra and repeat it to yourself whenever you are doing wedding planning:
Every Dollar You Spend On Your Wedding Is Less That You Have To Put Towards Your New Home!
With that in mind, we have listed below the top tips you can use to help save yourself money as you go along in your wedding planning process.
1. Mind Your Wording.
When you call a reception hall or other wedding vendor to inquire about booking your event, make sure that you refer to your event as a party instead of a "wedding reception". Often times as soon as these greedy vendors hear the word "wedding" the cash registers start ringing in their ears and they'll raise their prices, in some cases by up to 50%!
2. Open the Bar (But Only a Bit)
Instead of offering a full selection of top shelf liquor, consider cutting down the choices of alcoholic drinks to a few choice beers and a few good wines. If people feel they must indulge in mixed drinks, then they can pony up the cash for it.
3. A Three-Hour Tour? Forget it!
You call up a limo company and tell them you need to reserve a limo to take you from the church to the reception and suddenly you get hit with, "There is a 3-hour minimum reservation for all wedding parties". At $50 an hour, that gets expensive pretty quickly. However, call that same company up and tell them you need a pickup from point a to point b, and they will tell you its only a $60 one time charge to get you there. Which way makes more sense? Why pay for 2 hours of service that you don't need when you only have to get from your church to your reception hall?
4. Ebay! Ebay! Ebay!
If you are trying to be as careful with your wedding budget as you can, does it really make sense to spend upwards of $1200 on a dress that you are going to wear one day for about 10 hours? When you think about it, thats around $120 an hour just for wearing the wedding dress! Save youself some major dollars by visiting Ebay and searching for "wedding dress". Our last search revealed over 20,000 listings! Surely you can find something you like from these, and probably from a designer you wouldn't be able to afford even if you were buying new. If you find a dress you like, you likely will have to pay for a dry cleaner for a cleaning and tailoring, but the tremendous savings you'll realize over buying a brand new boutique dress will be well worth it. Bonus - Many of the Ebay sellers are in fact smaller boutiques that will custom make your size, but at a fraction of the prices you'd pay going into the store!
5. Flex Those Dates.
Weddig vendors charge the highest prices for Saturday night events. The reason? High demand - Saturday nights are the most sought-after party night. If you can be flexible on your date you can save big bucks with your vendors. These vendors often sit in dark rooms on Friday nights or Sunday afternoons with nothing to do except think about their next big Saturday payday. If you can schedule your wedding reception for the vendor's usually open times, you can expect big savings. Bonus of having a Friday/Sunday reception - You may not get as many guests that can attend your wedding reception, but they will still send you a wedding gift often in the form of a gift check! You'll have more gift money, and you will not have had to cover the cost of feeding them!
6. "Crop" the Photographer
A good photographer is worth their weight in gold. After all, the photos (and video) you have are all that you will have to look back and remember your wedding day. However, there are some ways you can save money on your photographer and still have great pictures to look back at. You probably don't need him there to shoot your pre-wedding preparations with your bridesmaids and mothers. After all those folks will bring along their cameras, just make sure they give you doubles. At the reception, you'll have to give him a few pictures that he must get, like the cake cutting, first dance, the toast and and so on, but there really is no need for him to set up shop and start taking formal pictures of everyone in attendance. Also, you don't need him to go around and get a group shot of every table full of guests. You should save money on these shots, and put disposable cameras at your tables and let your guests have some fun with them. You will get more candid and a better variety of pictures this way! And before you book your photographer, be sure to find out prices of enlargements and reprints. A cheap "package deal" isn't much of a deal if he then charges $50 for every picture you want enlarged to an 8 x 10.
7. Cut and Cut Again.
You have probably heard this before, but the best way to save the most significant amount of money on your wedding is to cut the amount of guests you invite. Do you really need to invite your moms second aunt once-removed and her three adult kids who you have only seen one other time in your life, which was at some other distant relatives wedding? There were people at our wedding reception that I had never seen before, and haven't seen since! Why did we waste the money to feed them? The wedding reception should be, in our opinion, a chance to celebrate a special event in your life with those people that mean the most to you! Its not the time to invite all the distant relatives that you don't even know. And lets face it, at your wedding reception you are not going to have time to have a sit- down, get-to-know-you conversation with these people that you only know from their annual Christmas card.
In conclusion, it may be difficult for you to stick to your wedding budget when you see the glamorous photos of model brides in their designer dresses having an eloquent reception at a luxurious reception hall. However, if you want to stick that budget you set when you started planning your day, you must remove your emotions from the decisions and remember the key reason for of sticking to your wedding budget:
