According to the website Cost of Wedding, the average wedding in America costs over $28,000. Now you may be thinking to yourself that that number is quite reasonable. But if you are anything like me, you probably think that number is ridiculous. True, your wedding day is one of if not the most memorable day of your life and hopefully you are only going to do it once, so why not go all out. But $28,000…and that is the average? I can think of a lot better ways to spend that money than on flowers and party favors. But here's the key. My wife and I had a $30,000 wedding when we got married, but we paid less than $10,000 for a wedding of over 350 people. How did we do it? Here are a few quick tips on how we planned a very affordable wedding.
Dessert, Not Dinner
Feeding your guests can often be the most expensive part of any wedding. It is not uncommon to have to pay in the neighborhood of $50 pp just for the food portion of your wedding, and not including cake. We decided because we were going to have a large wedding we would simply do the wedding in the evening (started at 7pm) and have a dessert reception instead of a full sit down meal. It was still very classy, but we saved a ton of money as paying for cake and dessert was only a fraction of what a meal would have cost.
Use Your Friends
For us, this came about for two reasons. First, we wanted to save some money. So using our friends to help us buy decorations, decorate on the day of, make dresses for the bridesmaids, etc. all helped us to save money. Plus, we had some terribly talented friends and our wedding gave them a chance to showcase what they do. So chances are you have some gifted friends as well so get them involved in your wedding. It will save you some money and they'll probably have a lot of fun being involved.
Do Your Homework
The wedding industry is a multi billion dollar industry and there are a lot of companies that are happy to over-charge you for their services. But there are also a lot of smaller companies that will do much better job and cost less, but you just have to find them. So dedicate yourself to doing your homework on the different wedding services in your area. One huge area you can save is on photography. You can pay up to $10,000 just for photography, and it doesn't always mean that the $10,000 photographer is better than the $3000 photographer. Sometimes all it means is that they are more expensive! So do your homework and I guarantee you'll save some money.
As your big day approaches or as you are involved in someone else's big day, try out these few things. You may find that with all that extra money you save you can splurge on your honeymoon!
