Rhiannon’s “Talking About Weddings”

No matter what your wedding budget is, I’m sure you want the best for the least amount of money. But finding good deals, and money saving tips isn’t as easy as you might want. I remember skimming each “how to have a great wedding on a shoestring budget” book I could find—only to be disappointed by what I found. The tips were often just too common sense, impossible for me to do (like making all the dresses) or too compromising (like suggesting that we skip a reception to save money).

So, four years ago when we were planning our wedding I thought to myself, “One day I’m going to write a book, Making the Most of Your Wedding Day Budget!” I haven’t written it yet, maybe I still will, but for now I plan to use this blog to share my tips and thoughts on this subject. I will regularly write entries on tips and creative ideas so keep coming back to see what I’ve added! They will all be posted under the sub category of “Saving Money”. I promise to give you real tips and ideas—the “meat and potatoes” kind of information you’ve been looking for!
Please use the comments section to ask question and share your money saving tips!

Some of the Things We Did for Our Wedding:

• We found a paper company where you could buy Wedding Invitations and have your information printed on them. We chose one, and though it wasn’t what I really wanted, I was willing to compromise for the savings. We then took the blank invitations and had a printing place help us design and print them. We decided to pay a bit more to have professionals design and print them. I was afraid we’d mess them up and have to buy more, plus color ink for the printer wasn’t cheap. I don’t remember the exact amount, but we saved around $200.00 and they ended up looking very nice.
• We made CDs of our favorite love songs to give as favors to our guests. We got the idea from looking at the back of a bridal magazine and saw a company that made them for you. We loved the idea, but they were charging $15.00 a CD! By that point in our planning we only had about $30.00 left for favors for 150 guests. We decided to make them ourselves and had a fun time doing it! We bought a huge stack of blank CDs and jewel cases for about $25.00. We made 75 and saved over $1,000.00! We picked our favorite songs—everything from Elvis Presley to K-C & Jojo. We designed a cover and splurged on CD labels. At the reception we had all the CDs sitting in a pretty basket and had the DJ announce that each family was to take one home. People loved them and still comment on them! My grandmother plays her CD all the time—it’s so cute!
• My In-Laws threw a Rehearsal Dinner BBQ and saved hundreds on food. Everyone had fun and the casual atmosphere was great.
• We chose a beautiful church that included great decorations. We didn’t spend anything extra to decorate the church and it looked amazing! The church decorated the isle with single candelabras (they were tall poles with hurricane glasses and pillar candles inside). From candelabra to candelabra tulle was draped. It looked fantastic and I’m sure no one noticed we didn’t have large flower arrangements.
• For our centerpieces we recreated a look I found in a Martha Stewart book. We found large, beautiful discontinued wrought iron lanterns at Pier 1 Imports at 75% off! We had the store employees call around to other stores and ship all their lanterns (most stores only had one or two left and we needed about 20). We got all the lanterns in about a week and bought pillar candles at the 99 Cents store. We scattered rose petals on the floor of the lanterns and had them trailing out of the ajar glass doors. I don’t remember the total cost, but it was very inexpensive and I got the gorgeous look I wanted.
• We did our own flowers. We bought an amazing amount of roses (100+) and many other types of flowers at the LA Flower Market. We were able to buy all our flowers for about $150.00!!! We actually had a bucket of roses left over we had so much! From what I was finding out at florist shops, I would say we saved at least $3,000.00! I had a round bouquet with two dozen roses that would have cost over $300.00 had we hired a florist to make it. If your area doesn’t have a flower market, look for whole sale flowers on the Internet or buy flowers from a place like Costco or Sam’s Club. I met a bride that bought all her flowers at Costco and had an arrangement party with her brides maids the night before the wedding. She said she only spent $300 and she too had flowers to spare. If you are worried that you won’t be able to make a bouquet, you can always have yours done by a florist and make the very simple bouquets for your bridesmaids. Just buy some flowers and practice to see if you think you can do it. My only caution with this tip: Make sure you research your flowers and only buy hardy ones that don’t wilt easily and have a cool place to store them! You don’t need a cold place, just a cool place so they won’t wilt.

• We planned our wedding timeline so that all the reception events we wanted our photographer to cover would happen within a few hours. We saved a lot by not having to go up to the next package to get more coverage time. We saved roughly $500.00 by planning this way.

  We saved money in many other ways and I have come across many more ideas and tips over the past few years. I will regularly write entries on this subject. We covered a lovely wedding this past Saturday that had a lot of great touches that I will share (with pictures) next week!
  

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  This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 1:20 pm and is filed under General Information, Wedding Planning, Money, Saving Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.