When the topic of budget-conscious weddings comes up, I
always feel a pang of guilt. Although we are sticking to a fairly ambitious
budget (read: two-thirds of the average wedding cost for our area), I always
feel as if we could do better. Brendan and I have a goal of paying off our
credit cards within the next few years, and since I am still in “training” as a
research scientist and just got out of graduate school a few years ago, I
definitely have some debt to pay off! It’s nothing too serious, but both he and
I agreed that we would like to pay for the wedding without adding to our credit
card debt. But there is always this nagging thought that with the amount we
will be paying for the wedding, we will be keeping ourselves from our goal of
being debt-free for that much longer.
We're going to need a little more than this! (source)
When we first started trying to create a budget for the
wedding (something I suggest doing before
you try to nail down any details!), Brendan and I were astounded to see how
much everything costs. Before we were engaged, we had always assumed that
people who spend $30k or more on a wedding are going for an all-out, lavish
affair – now we know that if you’re not careful, you can easily spend that much
on a bare-bones wedding!
When we first decided to keep our budget relatively low, we
had high hopes of our wedding being around $5,000-10,000. To be honest,
anything more than that seemed crazy! But as we started looking at tips for how
to keep the cost of your wedding down, everything we saw boiled down to two
pieces of advice: 1) Limit your guest list, and 2) Rely on “friendors” (friends
with skills that can help with your wedding) for as many things as possible.
Now, our guest list is already pretty limited – we’re
inviting only family and close friends, and we think we will end up with around
85-100 guests total. Sure, it’s not a 20-person cocktail party, but we’ve kept
it as small as possible for us. That leaves friendors – an idea that’s a bit of
a sticking point for me.
Let me explain: Everywhere I looked on the internet, I found
all sorts of articles featuring “budget-savvy” weddings, advertising
vanishingly small budgets. Certainly I could do what they did and have a
stunningly beautiful wedding with a low budget, right? Well, wrong. Because
those weddings? Were filled to the brim with friendors. How many people
actually know a professional photographer (not just someone who owns a nice
camera!), a caterer, a cake baker, a videographer, a cellist, and someone with
a really big barn suitable for a wedding? Not many people, I’d venture to
guess. But it’s those weddings that end up on the internet – totally not
realistic! Of course it’s possible to have a beautiful wedding on a low budget
without knowing all of these people – but unless you have a friend who can
cover one of the bigger budget items (for us, venue/catering and photography),
it is significantly harder than it looks.
Still holding out for someone with a car like this! (source)
For Brendan and I, our friendors were much more limited. A
family friend of Brendan’s is a DJ, and he is giving us a bit of a break (we think!)
on his event pricing. And Brendan’s uncle is a deacon, so he will officiate our
wedding – but this will be along with our priest, and we are still paying the
charge for renting the church for the evening. We do know people who do
photography and play music professionally, but their skill sets don’t really
match weddings – the photographer photographs only jewelry (great for the
rings, but not so wonderful for action shots), and the musicians are more
rock-oriented, not very wedding-appropriate.
We love our friendors, but we certainly aren’t saving much
money by using them – so what are we to do? Well, aside from generally
committing to be budget-conscious, the best thing we can do is to incorporate a
lot of DIY elements. Luckily, I happen to be pretty crafty, so this is the
easiest thing for us to do – and the best way for us to get the wedding décor we
love but not break the bank. I’d estimate we have saved about $1000-2000 just
by putting together most of our decorations ourselves! And choosing a venue
with all-inclusive packages (including cake and flower vendors) certainly helps us stick to the budget, too!
How did you stick to your wedding budget? Did you have any
sweet deals from friendors?
No comments:
Post a Comment