How to have a nice wedding for under $6000

Yesterday over at Anna’s blog, she asked the ladies to give their input on wedding expenses. There were so many varied and interesting responses! I decided I wanted to put a little bit of our story on here, in hopes that it might help another couple someday.

I read on some wedding website that the average wedding in the United States costs about $24,000. That is approximately how much money I make at my job in a year (talk about perspective! No way am I going to spend a year’s salary on one day!). In the very beginning stages of our engagement, my fiancé and I decided we would set a budget for our wedding of $6000. I wasn’t even sure how we would come up with that much. But the first thing that had to happen is we had to get realistic with our expectations. I have been to a couple of very extravagant weddings. We had to know that that was not what we were going to have. I have also been to a few wedding that were done very inexpensively. These weddings were still beautiful, they were still fun, and at the end of the day, the couple was still married. If you want to do an inexpensive wedding, you have to adjust your expectations, and also realize that though your Wedding day will be a marvelous day, it will still only be one day, and you don’t want to spend the next couple of years (or a year’s salary) paying for one day.

Before I go into details, I want to preface this by saying that it is by the grace of God that we will have this wedding with pretty much no debt. One reason, which won’t work for every couple, is that my fiancé has been doing a lot of freelance work in addition to working his regular hours. The Lord really opened up a lot of doors for him to take on several projects over the past few months. Almost all of the wedding/honeymoon is getting paid for from his freelance jobs.

The company that my fiancé works for designed our wedding invitations and all other paper collateral. We only had to pay for the printing. This saved us so much money! We paid less than half of what couples normally pay for these things, and the invitations, etc were extremely unique and of high quality. They were fun and colorful and non-traditional, which fits our personalities pretty well.

We have also been blessed by a lot of talented friends. One friend is going to do our photos for free. He does photography as a hobby, not professionally, so we do not have to jump through all of the business hoops. He takes nice photos, and has experience doing weddings. Photography is often the largest cost of weddings, and we are having ours done (including the photo files) for free! We will have to have them printed though, but that is a much smaller cost. A different friend is going to shoot video for the wedding, which he is doing in exchange for my fiancé shooting video at a different occasion. With the help of my laptop, a friend is going to DJ the reception for us, with a PA system borrowed from a different friend. And as part of the ceremony, 2 other friends are going to sing and play guitar for us. We have a group of friends who will decorate the reception site and make sure things are running smoothly during the reception as well. All of our friends are doing these things as favors to us! When you are a planning a wedding, scout out the talent of your friends! By calling in favors from friends, we have been able to spend more money elsewhere.

We are having our wedding ceremony in the chapel at our church. We are paying a very small fee for this. If you are a member of a church, you can usually have your wedding there for free or for very cheap. Our church also has a lot of decorative items that they are letting us borrow. Perhaps your church does too. To save money, we decided to forgo costly flowers. The only flowers involved will be my bouquet, my bridesmaid’s bouquets, and boutonnières/ corsages for the groom, groomsman, parents and grandparents. All of the flowers will be fakes, which are cheaper than real, and means that I can keep my bouquet forever if I want to. We are going to use a lot of candles and ribbons to decorate the ceremony site instead, and it will all be very simple. Here is another great tip: see if any recently married friends have decorations just taking up space in their closets and basements that you can borrow. A good friend of mine is letting us use tons of candles, some ribbons, and an aisle runner. She also gave us all of her leftover bubbles for blowing after the ceremony. Think about it, after your wedding, what else are you going to do with all of those decorations?!

We are going to have our reception at a local community center. The one near our church actually has a lovely banquet room, just as nice as any fancy banquet hall. Definitely consider community centers when looking for an inexpensive reception site. Another option is to have the reception at your church if they allow that. Our church does, but because we are getting married the week before Easter, there are too many events going on at our church, so we are only able to use the chapel. To save money on cakes and decorations, we decided to order individual 8” round cakes for each table to serve as centerpieces. We are getting the cakes at Wal-Mart, and it works out to cost around $2/person for cakes. When I (briefly) shopped wedding cakes, the lowest cost I found was $4/ person. Our cake centerpieces are cheaper, doing double duty as dessert, and will be a nice unique touch that I think the guests will enjoy. We will also use confetti and candles to decorate the tables. We aren’t doing much else to decorate for the reception, because I don’t think it’s really very necessary, and I couldn’t come up with any other ideas that I liked.

The bulk of the money we are spending is on food. I read many books and websites about how to save money on food, and a couple great ideas are to have just a cake or punch reception, or to just serve light hor’ dourves. However, almost all of our guests will be driving from 2-3 hours away, and so we thought it only right to serve them a full meal. We are vegetarians, and are not going to be serving meat at our reception. This is a really good option to save money. I could not imagine how much it would cost to serve chicken to 180 people! Now I know many people turn their nose up to the idea of a vegetarian reception, but we are serving several styles of pasta, that are typically meatless anyway! People will not even miss the meat when they are eating fresh pesto pasta or spaghetti. This is an idea to consider if you are trying to save money. We also decided to serve the meal buffet style, so that we do not have to pay a wait staff. The pasta we are serving is quite delicious and I think that everyone will be very satisfied. The place that we are having our reception does not allow alcohol to be served. Our parents were very upset that we weren’t going to be able to serve alcohol, but it is actually a huge blessing that it is not allowed. For one, alcohol is very expensive! It definitely didn’t fit into our budget. Nor did hiring a bartender. And we also won’t have to worry about people drinking too much and trying to drive home.

One area that I saved a ton of money was on my dress. My dress was about $160. I did not buy a bridal gown, I instead bought a very lovely ivory evening gown that looks really beautiful on me. Some women may want to splurge a little more in this area. I preferred to splurge on the food instead, because the dress didn’t mean as much too me. I encourage bride to think outside of the box on this one. For one, a dress doesn’t have to be white. I honestly never wanted to wear a large white dress. I tried several dresses on at David bridal, and as I suspected, my short, high waisted, wide hipped, stature was significantly overwhelmed by the large, poufy white dresses. In my past dreamings of my wedding, I always dreamed of a small, more casual, less traditional wedding, in which I wore a pale pink gown. This dream didn’t match up with my fiancés dream however and we had to compromise a little bit in some areas. One was that he really wanted me to wear a white or ivory gown, and so I chose an ivory dress. I realize however that for many brides, the white dress is very important. Some good alternatives are to wear a white bridesmaid dress, a white prom dress, or a white or ivory evening gown instead. Hundreds of dollars can be saved in this way. Perhaps you could even borrow a dress. Maybe you could wear your mother or your sister’s dress. Some of the nicer secondhand shops in your town might also have bridal gowns in very good condition. Saving money is about being creative.

We also really lucked out on our honeymoon, although it is still going to be a little pricey. At some point I got my hands on a catalog for the Sandals resorts. These resorts are very expensive, and I didn’t think for even a second that we could afford it. But the idea of an all inclusive resort was really appealing to us. We searched around and couldn’t find anything we really liked. Then one day we went to the Sandals website and saw that they were having a 50% off sale! We couldn’t pass it up! It was only slightly more than we wanted to spend, but we think it would be well worth the little splurge.

My last tip is to beware of anything the with word “wedding” in the title. It means there has been an automatic mark-up in the price. One example is with our cakes. “Wedding” cakes are expensive, but the same amount of cake and frosting in any other form will cost significantly less. Here is one that really got me. I saw unity candle sets selling for around $30. These did not include candle stands/holder, just the 3 candles. That’s 2 tapers and 1 pillar candle. I will be getting my 2 tapers and 1 pillar candle at the dollar store for less than $5, thank you very much! Shop around, think outside of the box, do your research! You can also get a lot of wedding books and magazines at the library instead of buying them, and the internet has been an invaluable resource.

That about wraps it up for us. One thing that I want to note is that the $6000 we are spending on the wedding/reception/honeymoon does not include our rings. Those would add a good bit more to the total we have spent, but we have already paid for those in full as well. Rings do not have to be expensive though. It’s a good idea to shop around a lot.