Tag Archives: wedding

Planning a stunning wedding ceremony on a budget

When we first started planning, we thought we were having a tiny ceremony with immediate family only, so ceremony and reception venues weren’t a big issue. That changed when we determined that we wanted to have an actual guest list.

We met at Indiana University, but our families lived on separate sides of the state. So we decided to meet in the middle and get married right where met in one of my favorite places in the world, Bloomington, Indiana. Luckily, IU has an absolutely beautiful little chapel right in the heart of campus.

I loved Beck Chapel for all four years of my college career, so I instantly knew that’s where I wanted to get married. But choosing a ceremony venue isn’t always so simple. I didn’t really consider anywhere else, but if I had there would have been a huge list of things to consider, not the least of which being price. Here are some tips for planning your ceremony without breaking the bank:

1. Get married at your church – This one is obvious. If you belong to a church or other place of worship, you can usually have your wedding there with no facility charge or only a nominal donation.

2. If your guest list is small, your venue should be too – We only invited 50 people to our wedding, but I didn’t want to walk down the aisle in a big empty chapel. Beck Chapel has a 65-person capacity. This is a deterrent for many brides who consider having a ceremony there, but it was perfect for us. We filled the chapel without inviting 300 people.

3. Choose a venue that doesn’t need additional decoration – Beck Chapel’s interior is adorned with ornate wood, and a gorgeous candelabra stands at the front of the altar. I loved its beautiful simplicity, and I didn’t think it was necessary to add flowers or other decorations. Wedding venues are often stark and bare until you add thousands of dollars of flowers and decoration. Beck Chapel was perfect just as it was. Skipping the decorations saved us a TON.

4. Find an all inclusive venue – We paid $300 to get married at Beck Chapel (a pretty big amount of money for a ceremony venue considering many people pay nothing), but that fee included the organ, organist, and a curator who organized our ceremony. The fact that we didn’t have to pay for flowers or a musician offset the high price of the venue. When you’re shopping for ceremony venues, find out what’s included with each and figure that into your final decision. Of course, if you’re like me, and you absolutely fall in love with one place over all others, then shuffle around your budget so you can afford to get married there.

5. If you’re on a really tight budget, don’t rule out getting married at home – My sister opted to have her wedding at my parents’ house. A wedding at home doesn’t have to be like the extravagant affairs you see on “Bravo” with millions of dollars in catering and decorations. There’s something very intimate about a wedding at home, and it can be the perfect solution for a private, affordable ceremony. Canopy and chair rentals are cost-effective considering the fact that your ceremony venue will double as a reception venue.

Come back next week for tips on planning an elegant reception without spending a fortune!

Wedding planning: Looking at the big picture and getting started on the right track

This week I’m covering basic initial planning and getting yourself started on the right track. You’ll find that I come back to these basic principles throughout the series because they truly were the basis of my wedding planning strategy. They affected each and every detail of my wedding, and ultimately determined our bottom line.

Prioritize and cut corners on the things that matter less to you.

When you first start planning, it can be overwhelming. There is so much to do. One of the most helpful tips I read in the beginning was, “Sit down and think about exactly what you want. Look at the big picture before you start planning.”

Many wedding planning magazines and websites urge you to think about everything you want so you won’t leave out any of the over-the-top fantasies you’ve always had about your wedding day. When I sat down to think about the big picture, I considered what was most important to me instead.

I considered doing a small affair with just immediate family in a casual setting, but I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to miss out on the basic traditions: the white dress, the floral bouquet, my best friend as my maid of honor, or having the people close to me beyond my immediate family present.

Once we had a list of what was absolutely most important to us, we started cutting out the things that didn’t matter so much. I didn’t need a huge, extravagant party with a DJ and dancing. I didn’t really want a sit-down dinner or a huge guest list. All of those things cost a lot of money, and many people think you have to have them just because most people do. But if it isn’t important to you, then it’s not worth spending all that money. If you figure out what matters most to you, you can spend more of your money on that stuff.

Keep your guest list short

This isn’t an option for everybody because it’s a tough thing to do. Ultimately, I felt that my wedding was a very personal thing, so I only wanted my closest friends and family to be there. Our guest list ended up being about 50 people.

Our small guest list saved us money in a lot of ways. We had a beautiful reception venue at an absurdly affordable price, but the catch was that the place only held 50 people with no room for dancing.

This worked for us because we didn’t want a lot of people there. If inviting your entire extended family is one of your priorities, you’ll have to cut corners elsewhere to make it work.

Keep your attendant list short

Both my husband and I have known our best friends for many years. They were our college roommates, and we’ve known them since childhood. So it was very important to us to include them in our wedding. However, even though I have three sisters and a sister-in-law who I love very much, I just couldn’t do 5 attendants for each of us. It would have complicated the process of choosing their attire and inflated our flower costs.

We loved having two attendants. It made our best friends feel extra special, and it also made it a lot easier to plan for attire and buy flowers.

Do it yourself if you can.

This is the most obvious tip for planning a wedding on a small budget, but it bears repeating. If you can do it yourself, then it’ll probably cost you a lot less. We made our own invitations and favors, provided the music for our reception by creating a huge iPod playlist of our favorite songs, and made our own centerpieces for the tables.

Open a separate checking account for wedding funds and ONLY use that debit card when paying for wedding related things.

This final tip is about money management. Even when planning a frugal wedding, it’s easy to be swept away in the planning and spend more than you want. That’s why it’s important to keep the money that you’ve saved specifically for the wedding separate from your day-to-day living money and your regular savings.

We had a lot of money coming in from several different sources, including our own savings and contributions from our parents. To simplify things, I kept all of the wedding money in a separate wedding account with a debit card.

You could easily open an ING checking account for this purpose and earn a little interest in the months leading up to your wedding. Whatever works for you. I just know it would have been a lot more confusing to keep track of our budget and stay on track if our wedding funds were combined with our regular money.

Having a separate account also made it a lot less painful to make those big purchases. The money was there and it was set aside specifically for our wedding, so I didn’t even flinch when I had to spend large amounts of money for the big-ticket purchases like the reception food.

Come back next Wednesday for the second installment: cutting costs for the ceremony and reception!

It IS possible to have the wedding of your dreams on a small budget

My husband and I got engaged last July less than a month before we moved 800 miles away to a new city. Not only did the move cost us a fortune, but our income was cut dramatically. We were also in the process of paying down debt and trying to live on a lot less money, so the last thing I wanted to do was charge anything on a credit card.

With a little planning and a lot of compromising, we managed to plan a beautiful Indiana wedding from 800 miles away on a $5000 budget without increasing our debt or sacrificing what mattered most to us. The money came from our savings as well as some generous contributions from our parents.

The wedding culture can be all or nothing … for a long time I thought you either had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your wedding or have a backyard barbecue with nothing in between. Last year, Kacie at Sense to Save wrote a series posts about how she saved money on her wedding, and I found it very helpful as I planned.

I did things a lot differently than she did, but it was encouraging to know that it’s possible to have a beautiful, traditional wedding without starting your life together thousands of dollars in debt.

I discovered that there’s an endless list of options between extravagant and super casual. You just have to determine your priorities, decide how much you can spend without putting yourself into debt, and sometimes talk yourself down from wedding mania with some realism.

Every Wednesday, I’ll be writing a post about a different aspect of our wedding and how we saved money and kept it simple. I hope this series can help some wedding planners put it all into perspective.