You start planning your wedding and when you hear the prices, you start thinking whether it’s all worth it. Don’t worry; you don’t have to apply for a credit or to go broke to get married. Follow some ideas, which will help you plan a beautiful wedding and not live off your savings in the following months.
♥ Prioritize
At the beginning of the planning phase, sit down with your partner and your wedding agent and prioritize all the wedding budget entries. For example, you can decide that having beautiful and expensive wedding rings is important to you, but you will cut down on decoration expenses. Or that you would like to get married in a high-class restaurant, but you will borrow your wedding dress. For our wedding, having the wedding ceremony in a garden was an important point of our image for the perfect wedding day. We chose a not-so-fancy spacious restaurant with a beautiful garden. This reduced the price of the restaurant entry, but we invested in a generous decoration – lots of flowers, arch, etc. to compensate for the restaurant interior and at the end of the day we had a beautiful setting for the reception.
♥ Define and control your wedding budget
It’s quite easy to spend more than the planned amount on a wedding, or on any event for that matter, if you don’t have a pre-defined limit that you have agreed on with your partner and will all participants who will have a say in the wedding financial matters. When you start talking with vendors and you mention the magic word “wedding”, the prices just as magically go out the roof. If you don’t have a budget, it will be easier for the eloquent salesmen to convince you to pick up a 5 course meal or a hand-made invites or that immensely beautiful and immensely uncomfortable shoes, which you will only wear on your wedding day.
♥ Rent your wedding gown and suit
If having your wedding gown make your wardrobe more beautiful or having your daughters play brides with it, are not in your list of priorities, you can rent. On one hand, renting would be much cheaper, and on the other – you won’t have to worry about storage after the wedding. Same goes for the groom’s suit with the important difference that he would probably be able to wear it on other official events after the wedding, while the wedding gown has a 1 day expiration date.
♥ Borrow your wedding vehicle
If you don’t like spending hundreds of leva on renting a wedding limo, research your friends’ rides for something presentable enough for a wedding car. You will dig up a proper car and you’re your request to borrow it for the day is accompanied by a nice wedding invite, the car owners would not be able to turn you down.
♥ Replace the wedding dinner with a cocktail
The restaurant is the main budget entry for most weddings. As an alternative to the wedding dinner, you can rent a hall and offer catering. This will significantly decrease your reception expenses.
♥ Bring your alcohol
Another option to bring down the reception expenses is to convince the restaurant manager to bring your own alcohol. Some restaurants put a fee on that option, which is usually about 50 lv and it’s Ok given the prices on which you can purchase alcohol from the store and the prices the restaurants sell alcohol to their clients. If you have a home-made rakia, you can make interesting rakia labels and reduce your alcohol spendings even further. Both of us – Stela and Teodora, used the wedding rakia made by Joro and Valio’s dads, ordered interesting labels and it turned out great.
♥ Get creative with the location
Besides the reception idea hall + catering, you can think about a country house of your friends or relatives and do a garden ceremony followed by a cocktail. The organization would be more demanding, but an outdoors wedding could turn into an exciting and memorable event.
♥ Get creative with the details
You can create your own wedding favors, table cards, or guest cars’ decoration. For our wedding, we bought our wedding gifts, because we weren’t creative and dexterous enough to craft our own, but I did the table cards and asked mom to make the wedding baskets and fortunes. You can purchase the needed materials from almost every market. My cousins created the guests car’s decorations on the day before the wedding and the whole experience turned out into a fun and bonding workshop.
♥ Think twice about invites
Of course, it is nice to have paper invites with your names on them, which you will proudly distribute among friends and relatives and may even frame after the wedding. If most of your friends are online or you won’t see them for a few days before the wedding, you can consider electronic invites. They can be just as beautiful and the texts just as creative and can save you a considerable amount of wedding money.
♥ Pick an out-of-season date
The busiest wedding months are during spring and early autumn. If you decide to get married in the winter, most restaurants will give you better prices and you will have better choices for all ceremonies.
♥ Plan your honeymoon out-of-seaso
The most travel-intensive months are in the summer and around big holidays like Christmas and Easter. If you choose the dates for your honeymoon in early spring or late autumn, you will certainly save on plane tickets. Most hotels offer lower prices off-seasons, as well. Another idea about your honeymoon is to request it as a gift from your parents or close friends. Even if they can’t collect the entire amount, they will provide a nice first installment and you will have a useful present, which you will fondly remember long after your wedding day.
♥ A friend to photograph your wedding
If you can take the risk that you might not look at your best on your wedding photos, you can ask one of your friends to photo shoot the event. Same goes for the wedding video.
♥ Re-think the wedding video altogether
Speaking of wedding videos, it’s one of the things Joro and I could have done without. It was a considerable part of the budget and we haven’t watched the entire film after the wedding. Not once. The pictures, on the other hand, made a great memory and we browse them quite often. Maybe 10 years from now, when we’ve forgotten the wedding day details, the DVD would be useful, but as of today it just stays in the drawer.
If you would like an experienced wedding agent to talk to about individual spending priorities and whom can create a budget and control it, Inanna wedding agency will gladly listen and help.
