August 2009 Weddings
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
What did you do...
to save money while planning your wedding? My brother is on a fairly strict budget going into wedding planning and I am trying to give him some ideas on ways to keep his expenses low.
First, they are planning a December wedding, so I suggested negotiating with vendors since winter is their off-season. I also told him to keep his number of guests reasonable since so many costs are driven by the number of guests. Any other suggestions? I know that some of you were amazing with DIY projects, so I am open to all ideas so that I can pass them along to him. Thanks for your help!
Re: What did you do...
I designed my own invitations. If he isn't up for that Download and print has ideas that you can print yourself.
Change the day you are getting married. Get married on a Friday or Sunday is typically cheaper.
For the reception have a signature drink, or just serve beer or wine. Having a full bar is expensive.
If he's having to travel to the wedding location, it may be cheaper to rent a vacation home VRBO.com to get ready in. Instead of hotels. I rented a house for my bridal party and my InLaws rented another. It was great to have a whole house and it fit more people.
Nix the favors. They are just a detail.
I can't think of anything else currently.
*edited. I thought of more*
My friend bought flowers from the Farmers market for the tables. They looked beautiful. The only thing she paid for was her bouquet and boutonnieres.
Negotiating's definitely big, especially in off-season. Some other things that really helped us save money:
1. We knew we wanted open bar and we knew we had a lot of big drinkers coming. It saved us a TON of money to go with a venue that did a flat per person open bar fee, rather than on a consumption basis. (This would obviously depend on specific fees and his group of guests.)
2. DIY invitations. They took MONTHS to do (seriously, I started making mine in December) but they ended up costing us about $3/invite as opposed to $12 for comparable invitations. (Same with programs, seating cards, menus, etc.)
3. Finding a florist who would allow us to rent vases rather than buy them.
4. Scouring boards like Trash to Treasure to buy stuff used like charger plates, candy buffet jars, etc etc.
5. In general, just doing tons of comparison shopping on each and every vendor. It was really a ton of work, but I'd say our wedding easily cost half of what it would have had we not researched the hell out of every single vendor and compared everything 10 times over.
The Daily Nugget
Cycle 12, IUI #1 - 33m post wash 10/15/10 = BFN
Cycle 13, IUI #2 - 15m post wash 11/16/10 = BFP, missed m/c, D&C 1/3/11
Cycle 15 - 18, IUI #3-6 = BFN
Cycle 20, IUI #7 = BFP!, missed m/c 9/14, D&C
DE-IVF Aug. 2012: ER 8/30 11R, 7M, 4F; ET 9/4 returned 2
Beta 9/18 #1-820, #2-1699, #3-7124
10/1 1st u/s measuring right on track, 125 bpm
We tried spacing out the cost of everything. Rather than pay all your bills at the end, right near the wedding, try booking people all spread out. One small bill each month is much better on your wallet than a lot of large bills all in the same month.
We did a lot of what others already said. Keep the guest count small, lots of DIY where you can and try to negotiate all you can.
One thing for him to keep in mind is that December is an off season for weddings, it's a big party time for companies and a lot of weekends might be booked.
Below is some of what I did. Granted mine was a destination wedding, we still had 75 people at it.
We got married at noon on a Sunday. This saved us 8K on the venue space and food. We had a full sit down lunch.
The cake I wanted was simple and having the resort do my cake was 1/2 the price of the other quotes I had. (And it tasted better than the other tastings!)
I made my save the date cards, invitations and thank you cards.
I used the white linens from the resort and added color to the table with overlays from Etsy.
The guys wore grey suits they had instead of renting tuxes.
No favors.
No dancing. We figured no one would be up for dancing in the middle of the afternoon. We had an iPod and speaker set up for background music. (Never heard one complaint about dancing.)
Guestbook was a table top, picture book of Vegas. People signed it with sharpies.
Centerpieces were made with fruit and minimal flowers since no one would take them home.
We ordered all the flowers for the bouquets and centerpieces through fiftyflowers.com and arraigned them ourselves. We ordered the boutonni?res and corsages through a local grocery store.
For ceremony decoration flowers we bought really pretty potted plants from a nursery rather than a florist.
We used vistaprint to get a ton of stuff for free.
DIY'd all paper things like invitation, ceremony programs, save the dates, place cards, etc.
Researched vendors like to crazy to compare prices and value for our money. We also negotiated with all the vendors rather than just accepting the price they first offered. We figured the worst they could do was say no.
We didn't do this but I've heard of people buy a small cake or a 1/2 fake large cake and having sheet cakes in the back to serve to the guest.
Took up all of our friends offers for help. I had a friend do my makeup and hair for free and Jason's cousin was our officiant for free.
Served a BBQ buffet (Brisket, Chicken, and Sausage) - I swear BBQ is one of the cheapest forms of catering and everyone loved the food.
Served only beer, wine and champagne. Also we made sure that any thing that was unused could be returned for a full refund.
Ditto vista print. Oh, how I miss you my old friend.
We found a venue that let us bring in our own alcohol rather than ordering it through our caterer. It saved us major dollars.
We got married on a Sunday night. This was actually due to the venue's availability, but it came complete with a nice cost savings.
We had a friend of a friend film the important parts of the evening--the ceremony, toasts, first dance, etc.
We chose cheaper entrees from our caterer (chicken and fish rather than beef) but didn't skimp on the appetizers. I can't tell you how many weddings I've been to where I couldn't tell you what they served as the entree, but I always remember good appetizers.
We had a dessert bar with cake and fresh fruit. This allowed us to have a smaller cake with a sheet cake in the kitchen, as well as mix up the flavors of cake we offered.
We contracted with our band for a set number of hours--I think 4 rather than the typical 3. Since overtime is so expensive, they were willing to reduce the price because they knew we were going to have them play until a set time.
I also ordered custom invites from Etsy for the rehearsal dinner and brunch. They came out wonderfully, and were the right price.
I bought alot of fake flowers from the dollar store and made my pew bows, boutaners, and corsages.
my center pieces were round mirrors with candles on it and I went half on them with my grandma as she was having her vows renewed for her 50th.
my family and i made our food no catering at all. had a work accosiate of my husbands make our cake.
no save the dates or seating cards were used.
Our photography package included only digital images on a DVD so that we could put together our own album and get prints done ourselves later.
No favours.
We saved a lot of money by DIYing the flowers (actually my brother's gf did it) but I wouldn't really recommend it... it took the whole evening before the wedding and it's a big hassle to find the space not only to do it all but to store everything. The centrepieces were dollar store vases with a couple of orchids and tall grasses - probably about $5 each as the orchids were only $20 for a large bunch.
We drove ourselves in our own car for parts of the day and our friend also agreed to drive us in his nice town car. (We stayed the night at the hotel and it helped that we were only a quick cab ride from home.)
We did family style dinner which got us a lot more food for what we paid than individually plated dinners would have cost.
We were lucky enough to have talented friends do the ceremony music for free.
Baby #2: Surprise BFP 9.19.12, EDD 5.24.13, natural m/c 10.19.13 at 9w
We did a lot of DIY. Invites, favors, unity candle, all sorts of things. Tutorials can be found online for almost anything so I would recommend instead of buying these items or paying someone to make them they do it themselves. It makes it more personal that way too!
Negotiating because of off-season is a great idea, and I would also have him consider a day other than Saturday. At our venue Saturdays were the most expensive, Fridays were the runner up, and Sundays were a steal. We saved almost 3 grand by choosing a Sunday as our date.
Use non-floral centerpieces. Flowers are expensive and so we opted not to have many. We wrapped vellum paper in our wedding colors around clear vases with candles in them for most of our tables, and then for some of them we reused the bridesmaid's bouquets as centerpieces. We paid for them so we figured we would get as much use out of them as we could!
Probably the most money that can be saved is on food. If he has the wedding at a time when people will have already eaten and won't be expecting a big meal then he can get away with finger foods and light dessert.