Planning a Wedding on a Budget

Certainly one of the biggest things to take into consideration when planning a wedding is the budget.  It is very easy to overspend when you don’t have a good wedding plan or guide to follow.

Jen and I really wanted to ensure that we still had a great wedding without blowing our budget.  We had a few ideas on where to save some money, but our wedding planner book gave us so many more ideas on where to cut costs without cutting down on quality.  That last point is very important as you certainly don’t want to cut corners on your wedding day by using inferior or tatty second hand items.

You can pay a small fortune on a wedding planner consultant, but we really didn’t think they could provide very good value for money when you can do the wedding planning yourself (with the help of a wedding book planner).

So where are some of the areas you can blow your wedding budget?

• While a wedding dress and bridal wear might well be a beautiful piece of clothing, the difference between amount it costs to make and the amount it sells for in a wedding shop is outrageous.  There are plenty of ways of still getting a great wedding dress without spending a small fortune.  A couple of tips we discovered were to shop around.  A speciality wedding shop is always going to charge a premium.  Quite often, you can find a suitable wedding dress in a department store.  Also, the second hand market for wedding dresses is really worth following up as they are the fraction of the price of new wedding dresses and in most cases they are in almost new condition.

• Catering is the main area where wedding budgets can totally get shot.  If you plan on keeping your wedding budget in shape, you need to keep a tight handle on catering, from reception hall, food and drinks.  You’ll find that quotes for wedding catering will vary hugely and it can often be hard to directly compare each quote.  There’s was a whole bunch of advice and tips in our wedding planner book that we used to cut our initial catering budget by at least 50%.

• Wedding Photographer.  Obviously you want great photos and video of your wedding, so don’t go trusting those precious wedding memories to one of your friends (unless they are already a professional photographer).  You might be amazed at just how much some wedding photographers can charge.   You also have to be very careful about what’s included in the price.  Some wedding photographers charge extra for travel time and one of the biggest additional costs is charging extra for the prints as a lot of wedding photographers don’t let you have a copy of the images on DVD without paying a small ransom.

That’s just a small number of things to take into consideration when you are planning your wedding on a budget.  Jen and I set ourselves a strict wedding budget of $5000, which we managed to stick with using a lot of the tips from our wedding planner book and we felt like we had a fantastic wedding due to not breaking the bank and sticking to a good wedding plan.