Ways to save money on your wedding…Part I
Today couples are spending close to $32,000 for their dream weddings, but there are several ways to save money if you’re on a budget. Trust me I KNOW! My husband and I got engaged May of 2006 and then married four months later in September. We not only had to budget time, but our financial situations would also require budgeting. This meant we had to make quick decisions and looking for ways to keep things beautiful, yet save some money. Weddings are always stressful for both the bride and groom, but the bride usually worries the most. Wanting everything to be “perfect” and just what she’s always dreamed of, the bride needs a high stress threshold to accomplish many of the money saving techniques. This means the bride IS the wedding planner. That alone will save you hundreds to thousands of dollars.
To begin your planning you should first find a location for your ceremony/reception. You don’t want to send out your invitations until you book a place to have your special day. We ran into problems here because of the short time we had to plan everything places were booked on some of the weekends we thought would be our wedding weekend. So we had to play with our date a little bit. If your engagement is longer this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. When we were checking with possible locations the rental fees were astronomical. The average price range was around $7,000 just for the site for 3 hours without catering, decorations, etc. Then the catering would be around $7-$10,000 to come out to the rental location. Then you would have to figure out the table settings on top of all that.
After a couple weeks with unreturned phone calls from possible sites and outrageous quotes, I felt hopeless and eloping to Vegas sounded better all the time. We knew we wanted to get married on the beach and were already getting the ceremony portion taken care of, but the reception location was becoming our problem because there were few places near the ceremony site and the ones we checked into were out of our budget. Finally, I thought about places that I could combine the rental site with the catering. I started calling restaurants and getting quotes from them, when it finally hit me! Why not try a local hotel. I thought of a hotel about a mile away from the beach we wanted to get married on and sure enough…they had accommodations for weddings. They even had 3 wedding packages to choose from and their prices were reasonable. They even offered a beautiful garden area with gazebo that you could have your ceremony at for a low additional cost. So after finding this we were in total agreement that this would not only save us money, but was the perfect distance from the ceremony site so our guests wouldn’t have to go far and out of town guests would have the convenience of staying close to everything.
So the reception site was finalized, but we still had to finalize the ceremony site, but that’s another blog…