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.

On Cooking

One of my greatest passions is for cooking. I love food. I love eating food, and preparing food, and food presentation as a form of art. I even love shopping for food, searching out new ingredients, learning how to select the best produce, filling my cart with new and exciting possibilities. For me, food is more than just a vehicle to get nutrients into my body. It’s one of my hobbies.

I did not always like to cook. Growing up, I never learned to cook, and also never learned appreciation for a home cooked meal. As a child and a teenager, I would much rather get fast food or frozen snacks. I started learning to cook when I was 19, but my eyes were really opened up to the world of food when I went vegetarian at age 21. I started reading websites and books about vegetarianism, and started leaning about vegetables I never knew existed. My family doesn’t eat many veggies, so I didn’t know much about them. Growing up, my grandma was out primary cook, and she does not like to season her food very much at all. She also hates garlic (tragedy!). I had no context for the vast array of flavors and spices out there! As I began experimenting with spices and vegetables and cooking techniques, my taste preferences changed dramatically. I always hated onions as a kid, but now I use them in everything! I now love veggies, and I also love ethnic dishes. I also learned how to bake from scratch instead of from a box, and there really is no other way! Muffins from scratch only take a couple minutes longer to whip up than muffins from a box, and use fresher and healthier ingredients than boxed mixes.

I am blessed to be marrying a man who has adventurous tastes! When we met he was not a vegetarian, but he had no reservations about trying tofu or bean burgers or anything else. He loves my cooking so much that he now eats almost exclusively vegetarian too. The only challenge is scaling meals down to fit just the 2 of us. I really do find it easier to cook for a crowd. This is part of the reason that I love having dinner guests and throwing parties.

I will probably talk about food a lot on this blog. I will probably include pictures from time to time. Right now I have a crappy camera, but hopefully we will be getting a new one soon. I also intend to do some product reviews and kitchen tips.

crazy times

With my wedding just 33 days away (!!!), I have been super busy. I moved into our new place a couple weeks ago, and have been working hard to make it into a "home". This can be tricky at times, considering that DF will still need to move his stuff in as well. We want to gradually move his stuff in over the next 2 weeks, and after that, he will be staying with a friend for the last couple weeks before the wedding.

There are still so many small details to be worked out for our wedding day, it makes my brain spin. I wish I had more vacation days at work, but I am using them all for the honeymoon! Otherwise, it would be great to take a day or two off to really work the details out. Or just to catch my breath! It's clear to me that the honeymoon became a tradition because after all of that planning, the couple needs a vacation!

Anyway, I have a few good ideas that I plan to write about here in the future, but I just have not had time to wrap my head around them and get anything written that makes sense. Soon enough, life will settle down, and I can get into a better writting routine!

So this is the new year

For me, there has never been anything very magical about the day we mark as the beginning of a new year. I don’t really remember ever making any resolutions, having always heard the jokes about how people cannot keep them. But 2007 ended up being a very chaotic year for me, and would like to take this time to symbolize a new beginning. So I’ve come up with some goals that I want to keep in my mind as I am living my life. I don’t want this to be a list of to-dos that looms over me, making me feel weighed down. Instead, I want it to be a list of ideas that may improve my daily life. So, here goes:

• I want to be more consistent with my devotional times. Somehow several months ago, I got really off track and off schedule, and have since had irregular devotional times and not really had a focus in how I am studying the bible. I want to get back into the habit of making devotional time a high priority daily, and currently I am going to bring my focus back into doing Beth Moore’s bible study The Patriarchs.
• I want to do a much better job at using time efficiently. A major part of this will be waking up at the same time every morning and having a morning routine. I have much more energy for things like cleaning the house and reading the bible in the morning, before the work day has drained me. So it would be wise for me to do these things in the morning. This also means going to bed at a decent time, so that I can be well-rested.
• I want to read more books. I love reading, but do not do it often enough. After the chaos of the wedding and adjusting to married life, I am going to start my book club up again. I will also try to read more I my own. I feel like reading is a good way to keep your mind sharp
• I want to pray more for my job. My job can be emotionally draining, and I am often frustrated by it or just worn down. I want to lift my work up to God daily, so that he might be glorified by how I spend my day.
• I want to take the dogs for more walks. We are moving to a safer neighborhood than the one I live in now, so I will feel more comfortable taking the dogs for their walks in the early morning and at dusk.
• I want to become an expert at spending less money. I want to be a better bargain shopper, and I want to put more consideration into the purchase I make.
• I want to become a great wife.

So those are my goals. They are very attainable. I am interested in other people's goals as well.

Finding a new home

With the wedding fast approaching (2 and 1/2 months to go!), my fiance and I beginning to get into the deeper details of planning the wedding, while also trying to find a place to live.

I have lived in this city for a little over 6 years, and have lived in 7 different spaces in that time. Needless to say, I am no stranger to moving. DF and I have done quite a bit of "scouting", trying to figure out what kinds of places are available and what features are most important to us. We are definitly going to be renting. We just are not ready to buy a house yet, and are not certain how much longer we want to live in Ohio. So rent we will.

The saying goes "home is where the heart is", and I thoroughly believe that. I am, however, excited about what will become the "space where our stuff is". I have been arranging our furniture in my head, and thinking about decorating schemes. Of course, I have also been examining the stuff in my apartment, and the stuff in my fiance's apartment to figure out what we need to keep and what we need to let go. We are hoping to be able to sell some stuff in order to help us pay for the hefty deposits that come from renting with pets.

Maybe this sounds superficial, but planning our space together has been a fun reminder that we are beginning our life together. Last night we bought an artifical Christmas tree (on clearance!), in preperation for our Christmases together to come. We were given a very nice television for Christmas, i think the first thing that has ever been "ours" and not mine or his. And my mother was generous enough to offer to purchase a new bed for us when we move into our new place. I am very excited about that, and even though I will be living in our new place for a couple weeks before the wedding, I don't want to sleep in our bed until after the wedding, when we are both there. We've looked at art, considering what to hang on our walls, figuring out how our tastes compliment each other. And over the past year, I've been slowing building my supply of nice kitchenware.

I know this kind of stuff isn't nearly as important as our faith, values, love, dreams and goals, which really hold our relationship together. But it's still so much fun! As a little girl, I loved playing house, and now it's becoming real. I've got the man of my dreams, 2 great dogs, and now we are forming our home together.