There’s no denying just how scrutinizing it is to look over the cost of everything you’ll need to pay for when planning a wedding. You have a lot on your plate. You have to accommodate everything that’s required from you as the bride and groom. It’ll often feel like there’s no end to the need to spend on different aspects of your wedding. At the end of the day, you’d want to be able to save as much money as you possibly can, without jeopardizing the ambiance and feel that you want to achieve for your wedding. Here’s a quick guide on what you can do to save money on your wedding.
How to Save Money on your Wedding
You want to have an incredible night filled with beautiful memories, romance, and love for your wedding day. You also want your guests to feel just as excited and loved as you do as you embark on the start of a new chapter in your life. But you’re also afraid that when you try to cut down too much on the cost of everything that you need to spend on for your wedding, that you won’t be able to achieve that dream wedding you’ve always wanted. Unfortunately, this is a misconception most soon-to-be-married couples have. This is simply not true. There are so many ways around a budget for weddings. These tips will help you create the wedding you’ve always wanted, without being forced to spend too big of a chunk of your life’s savings on this one day.
Hire the Right Wedding Planner
Different wedding planners have different experiences when it comes to building wedding events for certain budget points. There are some wedding planners who have more experience with creating extravagant and luxurious wedding set-ups with an uncapped wedding budget.
On the other hand, there are wedding planners who have dedicated their entire careers to creating beautiful weddings for the bride and grooms who do not want to spend a big sum of money on their wedding. This is where the importance of who you hire as your wedding planner plays a big role in how much you are obligated to spend on your wedding. You’d want someone who can easily accommodate your needs, around the budget point that you are hoping for. This will guarantee that you save money on your wedding.
Tips for Choosing the Right Wedding Planner:
Ask to see examples of their experience
There’s no harm in asking a potential wedding planner what their actual experience is. You’d want to know that they have handled weddings in the past that are at the same budget point as yours, to see what they can do with that amount of money. You’d also want to know if they have any experiences achieving the wedding theme that you are aiming for, at a lower cost.
Ask about their experience
A wedding planner who primarily caters to weddings located at the same location as yours will have a better idea of where to-go-to when it comes to choosing the right vendors and services for your wedding. You’d want someone who is familiar with the local prices and costs of everything from the flowers, the venue, the food, and even the hotels. By choosing someone who has this experience, they will be more capable of creating the wedding theme you are hoping for, at the budget that you are aiming for.
Ask for their own personal recommendations for budgeting tips
You’ll be able to tell just how efficient they are at cutting down the cost of wedding expenses without jeopardizing the actual outcome of the evening by just listening to what they can recommend for your wedding plans. This will be a good time for you to see if a wedding planner can accommodate the plans you have for your own wedding.
Once you begin to feel that a wedding planner knows exactly what you want, and how you can achieve this on a certain wedding budget, then you’ll know that you are talking to the right person. On the other hand, if things start to feel awkward, or you begin to feel like you have to keep explaining your vision for your own wedding as the planner can not fully grasp the idea you are aiming for, then it is time to move on to someone else. The relationship you have with your wedding planner should be both professional and comfortable. You should also have the same style and aesthetic preference. This will make it a lot easier for you to plan and save money for your wedding.
Use Fake Flowers
Creating floral arrangements for every aspect of your decorations can add up to a costly florist bill. As much as it would be wonderful to have fresh flower arrangements flooding your venue, it’s just not cost-efficient. The trick to save money on your wedding and still have beautiful flower arrangements as part of your decorations is to use both real and realistic looking flowers for your decoration. Source out the well-made fake flowers that you can use to fill-up your flower decorations, making them look grand, but without the costly consequence.
You can work alongside your florist to make this happen. Have the big bouquet and large centerpieces you’ve always wanted, without the actual need to spend hundreds of dollars to make this happen. The best part is, these arrangements will also be easier to create and will last through any weather. The key is knowing how to combine the fake and real flowers, to make them all look authentic. You can leave this for the creative eye of your florist.
Don’t Invite a Big Guest List
One of the biggest and costly culprits for an overly expensive wedding is an excessively large guest list. You don’t have to invite everyone you know to your wedding. If you do, you will be forced to spend a lot more money than you want to. Work with your wedding planner and try your best to cut down on a wedding party guest list, as much as you possibly can. This will give you the opportunity to delegate more of your money towards the more important parts of what will make your wedding so memorable. It’ll also guarantee that the experience you offer your guests will not be inadequate for the memories you want them to leave with.
How to cut down on your guest list:
1. Make a full list of everyone you want to invite to your wedding – You’ll first need to make a full list of everyone who you want to be at your wedding, to get a good idea of the number you’re starting with. Remember to focus on individuals who would want to be part of your special day.
2. Remove anyone who’s not personally interested in or knows about your relationship – You’ll want to invite people who are 100% interested in seeing you get married. Remove co-workers, old friends, distant family members, who aren’t really a part of your life anymore.
3. Remove the ‘friends of friends’ – It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you have to invite one person as they are associated with someone you’re close to. But this can’t be the case for your wedding. You can’t invite your ‘mom’s friend’ just because she’s a friend. Consider that extra individual another costly hundred dollars added to your bill.
Work with your wedding planner to get a good idea of what you can do to cut down on your guest list. This is a guaranteed way to save money on your wedding.
Use a Website to Invite your Guests
Its become somewhat of a traditional choice to send out artistically printed invitations for weddings. But what a lot of soon-to-be-married-couples don’t realize is that nowadays, this is an unnecessary and costly option. It’s also not an environmentally friendly option. A cost-effective way to send your invites, and frankly, a much more environmentally responsible direction, is to create a website for your invites.
Most people, if not, all of your guest list, all have access to the Internet. Send them a simple link to a website that has all the details of your wedding, including the option of sending their R.S.V.P. all on the website.
You don’t have to hire a website developer to create this. There is plenty of free websites developing choices online that you can use to create your websites. Just simply have a plan for your photos and your written content, and you’ll do just fine. Let your creativity kick-in and enjoy making a personalized website for your wedding invitations.
Buy Jewelry that’s on Sale
Another possible costly decision you’re obligated to spend on for your wedding is the jewelry for both the bride and the groom. Don’t feel too intimidated by this as there are ways to save money on your wedding by choosing the right place to buy your wedding jewelry from.
Choose to look for jewelry that’s on sale. You can now find many companies such as Brillianteers who offer affordable diamonds, silver, gold, and platinum jewelry at sale prices. They offer Wedding and Engagement Ring Sets at affordable prices. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to come across big sale holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas when many jewelry companies are cutting down their prices for the festive seasons. Keep a look-out for great deals. Being able to save $500 on your rings is a significant amount that will help you save money on your wedding.
Give Yourself at least 6 Months to Plan Your Wedding
People often make big and costly mistakes when they are rushing through big decisions for a wedding. A good way to guarantee that you save money on your wedding is to give yourself enough time to actually plan it out. Six months to a year should be the planning timeframe you are aiming for. There’s a lot that you can save money on if you have this time to make your decisions.
How time can Save you Money:
You can look for the most affordable vendors
You’ll have enough time to work with your wedding planner, to really go out and find the best vendors that fit your budget. This can save you a lot of money as you’ll have choices.
You have the choice of affordable venues
Venues often sell-out months or even years before the reserved. In many cases, this is more likely to happen with affordable wedding venues. Giving yourself time to plan can guarantee that you get a good choice of affordable venues for your wedding.
You can buy things in bulk or during sale periods
Take this time to go and hunt down sale periods and buy things in bulk. This can be anything from your dresses, your giveaways, your liquor, and even your decorations.
Giving yourself the time to plan your wedding will also give you the luxury of being able to buy or avail of services at a cheaper cost. The more time you have to plan, the more time you have to make the right financial decisions to save money on your wedding.
Stick to Hiring Local Start-up Businesses and Vendors
One effective way to save money on your wedding day is by choosing specific businesses and vendors to hire for your wedding day. You’ll find that the most affordable services to hire are the ones that are only just starting up and are new to the market.
Any service, be it a photographer, a florist, a wedding band, or a car service, if they are at the first stages of starting-up their business, then they’ll likely be offering really affordable prices. This is simply because they are just starting to introduce their brand and services into the market. The cheaper prices will encourage event planners to hire them, and thus, get their name recognized.
Work alongside your event planner to find the new businesses and services that are local to your area. You’ll be able to hire cheaper options and save money on your wedding, and you’ll also be giving them the opportunity for business. It’s a win-win situation.
Choose Simple Dishes that are Inexpensive to Make
What many brides and grooms often overlook is the fact that the dishes they choose to have on their menu for the big day, make the biggest difference in the overall cost of the catering. There are so many types of dishes that can be delicious and satisfying, without the expensive cost.
How to cut down on food costs:
Choose Chicken over Beef
Chicken as a protein is definitely the cheaper choice compared to beef. As tempting it is to serve steak on your wedding day, it’s just not practical if you are choosing to serve this to more than 50 people.
Choose cheaper fish that’s available in your location
You should do a little research to find out what fish or seafood is the most affordable and available within the region of your wedding venue location. You’d want to choose a piece of fish that’s easy and inexpensive to get for the big day.
Choose cheaper vegetables that are geographically in-season
It’s common knowledge that when any fruit or vegetables are in-season, they are sold for a lot cheaper as there’s an abundance of them. Find out what types of fruits and vegetables are in-season around the time that you will have your wedding and choose these for your dishes.
Choose to start with a filling soup and bread
If you start with a filling soup and delicious bread before your meal, you will not need to serve large servings of your main courses as the bread and soup itself will be good enough to satisfy the hunger of your guests. You can cut down on the overall portions of your main dishes if you offer delicious soup and bread.
These are effective options for affordable dishes that your catering team can create a delicious course with, without the expensive cost. Do a little extra research and go to your local market to see what products are the most affordable to use for your big day’s menu. This is a sure way to save money on your wedding.
Shop For Everything Online
As the internet took over everything in the business and the commercial world, there’s literally nothing you can’t buy online. This is the magic behind how to save money on your wedding expenses. With minimal effort, you can do all of your research and comparisons on your phone or laptop.
This can make the biggest difference as this eliminates the need for you to drive and invest time to go to different vendors and shops. You can do everything you need to do in the comfort of your own home. These are some really great tips on how to do this.
Tips for shopping online for your wedding:
Buy Items in Bulk
You will save a lot of money if you buy everything in bulk from one online shop. For example, all of your decorations, your wedding tokens, your accessories, and even down to your wedding shoes, can all be bought on e-commerce sites such as Amazon. Buying everything from one shop can open up opportunities for discounts, save you money on your shipping fees, and generally be an easier way to shop for a lot of the things you’ll need for your wedding.
Buy Your Jewelry Online
You would not want to have to go to different jewelry stores just to get your pick of the best wedding bands that work around your budget. Our team at Brillianteers has created a great selection of wedding rings for different budgets. This is to cater to all of the brides who do not want to spend too much time having to look around and compare prices. If you want, you can also have a custom design made for both you and your partner. This will help you save both time and money.
Always Read Reviews
You’d want to make sure that whatever you do choose to buy, will be of the quality you want it to be. You can only confirm that this is worth buying if you have reviews to review yourself. You should always take the time to read the reviews available to you. As much as possible, you’d want to buy items that have been bought and tested where people have confirmed that these products are just as they are advertised. This is a good way to guarantee that you are saving money on your wedding rather than wasting money.
Take Notes and Compare Prices
If you have a lot of options to choose from, don’t hesitate to take notes and compare prices. If you want to save money on your wedding, you’ll want to get the best deal out of anything you buy. This means doing a lot of comparative research.
See what options you have. Note down the ones you like the most and the reason why you prefer these products. Once you have a good list of different options, you can choose which one will be the best for you. You need to compare both the price and quality. You can expect that the more expensive something is, the better its quality. On the other hand, the cheaper something is, the more likely its made with cheaper materials. This will help you find the best balance of saving money while buying a good product.
Keep an Eye Out for Discounts – Sign up on Email Lists
A lot of the time, online shops give random coupons or discounts to keep their customers interested in coming back and buying more products. You can take advantage of these discounts as they can help you save money on your wedding if you are buying everything in big numbers. Sign-up to their email lists as this is how they most often let their customers know of their sales and where they send discount coupons. Since you’ll be taking your time doing research, you’ll have a lot of time to collect discount coupons too.
Do the Cart or Wishlist Trick
A lot of online shops will send you incentives in the form of discounts if they see that you have added something to your wishlist or your cart, but haven’t actually proceeded with the purchase. You can use this to gain more discounts on what your buying by adding all of the items you want on a cart or wishlist and leaving the site for a few days or weeks. You’ll find that they will email or text you, letting you know that they are either having a sale on these items or giving you a discount to lure you into coming back to buy them. This really works for most bigger online retail stores, and it’s worth a try if you’re planning to save money on your wedding.
Avoid Dynamic Pricing
In some online shops, there’s this strategy that websites use called Dynamic Pricing. This is something most people don’t really know about. This refers to a strategy that websites use to target different buyers with different price points. This strategy changes the prices according to your location, your browsing history, and what you spend on, on the Internet.
Airline websites use this strategy all the time. You’ll notice that if you ever buy tickets online, the prices are always changing. Most of the time, you’ll be looking at one price for a flight, and the next time you see this, it’ll already be marked as ‘sold out’ or at a higher price. This is done to make you feel like there’s an urgency to buy a ticket before you lose the chance of buying it at its cheapest price.
You can avoid dynamic pricing by doing one of two strategies:
- Delete your browsing history and cookies – First, you can delete all of your browsing history on your web browser and clean your cookies history. This is the part of your computer’s data that tells these websites all about your history of buying or browsing.
- Use Incognito Mode – You can choose to open a ‘new incognito tab’ on almost every type of web browser. When you shop online using this incognito mode, you will be detached from any of your browsing history. This simply means that websites will not have access to your browsing and cookies data. Therefore, they can not use dynamic pricing on you.
Shop on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the End of a Season
If your primary goal is to save money on your wedding, then you need to time your online shopping checkouts. In most cases, sales, discounts, and promos are given out towards the end of the week as these are the days that people are less likely to shop online. You can also take advantage of the end of the season sale and promotions as a lot of shops aim to get rid of the season’s remaining inventory by selling them at cheaper prices. Timing can make the biggest difference in the overall budget you spend on your wedding as you can shop during the times that most online stores drop their prices.
Use Cashback Websites
There are websites that are created to reward you for every time you buy from their affiliated businesses online. If you shop through these sites, they will give you a small percentage back of what you spent. This may not seem a lot at first, but if you are planning to shop in bulbs, and do so for different types of products and services, then the cashback can add up to a significant amount.
Work Alongside Your Wedding Planner
Last but not least, it’s really important that you work alongside your wedding planner. As easy as it may seem to buy everything online, it’s best to have someone next to you who has the experience and the knowledge to guide you towards making better choices. You wouldn’t want to purchase a bulk order of something, only to find out that it will not work for your wedding.
Final Thoughts
Create a beautiful evening that you can remember for the rest of your life. Create a wedding event that will be memorable and beautiful. But don’t think that you can’t do it without the opportunity to save money on your wedding. There are many ways around cutting the cost of your overall wedding expenses. If you do enough planning and become more creative with your decisions, you’ll definitely be able to pull off the wedding of your dreams, within the budget that you can afford.
