When saying I Do, I think its fair to also say I do (not want to go broke).
I may have mentioned once or twice that I’m a thrifty girl.
So when we got engaged last summer, saving money while saying “I do,” was a priority from the start.
If you have the huge budget great, awesome, I’m slightly jealous, but if not, this post is for you.
Of course a wedding is said to be the “most important day of your life” or one of them anyhow, but how much do you really have to spend to make that day special?
Not that much.
The things that make that day special, much more than food or how fancy the venue is, are your family, friends and new spouse.
All free. We had a limited budget and got really creative with our resources in order to keep our budget. Not to say it can’t be done even cheaper, because it can. As someone who has been there, here are money saving tips that helped us save thousands of dollars. More than $5,500 to be exact.
1. Time of year.
This is an easy way to save. Getting married in January allowed us to save $1,000 on our venue and $500 on our DJ. There are other perks to getting married in the off season, such as more photographers, caterers and venues have openings. Come October/Novemeber the good ones are usually booked solid.
2. Catering.
We did two big things in this category that saved us thousands.
- We used a food truck based out of Austin (http://thepeachedtortilla.com) to cater our wedding. Because we had almost 150 people, they came inside and set up a really nice buffet. Most of our guest didn’t even know the food was catered by a food truck at all and the food was awesome. I can’t recommend them enough.
- We provided our own appetizers. We bought crackers, cheese, trail mix ingredients (for a build your own trail mix bar) and s’more ingredients (yes we had a fire pit outside for s’more roasting) and displayed this all on a table. Forgoing appetizers saved us over $1,500.
3. I DIYed things
all of our centerpieces (buying colored bottles from craft stores), borrowed table runners from a friend and made my own table numbers which I later sold on Tradsey for $85.00. We never priced out how much it would cost to have someone else do all this, but I am guessing we saved at least another $1,000 and maybe more.
4. My cousin and bridesmaid did any bridesmaid who wanted hair and make up done as well as my hair and makeup for free.
She is a trained cosmetologist and she really rocked my look. This saved us approximately $500…probably even more but I’m gonna leave it at that.
5. A co-worker offered to be our day of coordinator for free.
Our venue offered this for $800 (bah ha ha).
6. We bulk ordered flowers and made the bridesmaid bouquets the day of using twine and bunches of baby’s breath.
This was so simple and saved at least $200.00.
7. Last but not least our awesome photographer, Brian Shofner captured our day wonderfully (photo credit to him for all the pictures on the blog) and gave us a great discount for being a referral.
Add all those savings up = $5,500 saved. And we really saved even more as I didn’t list everything. But it gives you a nice example of how do-able saving money can be.
Obviously there are lots of other ways to save money, but these are a few that really helped us. Good luck to all brides out there planning your special day! More pictures and wedding details can be found here on our Style Me Pretty feature. Read part 2 to this post here!
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