I’ve shot dozens of weddings in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Absolutely epic, and they cost virtually nothing.
We had beer and wine, if you wanted spirits or cocktails you paid. Dress was last seasons so was about half price, catering was done by a local firm and we told them it was for a large party, flowers yep silk was cheaper, decorated our own tables, booked a local town hall, a mate had a 57 chev as a limo, decorated the hall ourselves with balloons etc (we hired a helium tank), buy stuff from KMart (australia) not a “party” store, my suit I needed for work, DJ was a friend who loves being a DJ, photography was from the local arts school and he used it as his project, cake was a basic fondant style cake and we decorated it with silk flowers etc etc.
We just tried to do as much ourselves as possible and called in favors from people to get discounts.
120 people at about $3,000 all up and people still talk about how much fun it was!
Depends- when I was planning my wedding, my mother wanted me to have a “football wedding” since there hadn’t been one in the family for a long time ( like since the depression ended) . For those of you who don’t know ( most of you), a football wedding has nothing to do with a theme, or with a football game. It’s held in a place like a VFW or a church basement and it’s called a “football wedding” because the meal was wrapped sandwiches and guests got their food by yelling , " Hey Vinny, toss me a prosciutt’ ". And then Vinny did, hence “football wedding”. Change it to heros instead of individual sandwiches, and I think I could still do it for under $2000 for 50. That’s one example of what I meant earlier by “inexpensive style”.
Travel expenses don’t count as wedding expenses?
Things we did to keep costs down (and I wouldn’t consider our wedding super-cheap, because the things that were important to us were having our friends and family there and having yummy food, and anytime you feed a full yummy dinner to ~ 100 people, it’s going to cost some $$):
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Venue was a city-owned hall
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Catering was not from a typical wedding caterer, but from a local yummy ethnic restaurant that was just starting to beef up their catering business
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Food was buffet, more for flexibility than cost, what with the various vegetarian, vegan, lactose-intolerant and/or gluten-intolerant guests
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The hall was chosen in part because it was one of the few places that would allow using any caterer and bringing in your own booze, which saved a TON - booze was basically a big delivery order from a local liquor store, and they took back all unopened bottles
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Cake pricing was totally transparent, and we saved about half by having a small presentation cake for cutting, and sheet cakes to feed the bulk of the guests
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Flowers were my bouquet only - the rest of the wedding party got really cool peacock-feather corsages/boutonnieres. No worried about wilting things being delivered - we just dropped everything off at the venue the day before
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Table decorations were shallow glass bowls with colored glass pebbles and floating candles in them - again, nonperishable, do-it-yourself, and a small fraction of the cost of a professional floral arrangement
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Chuppah was borrowed from friends - she is an art teacher and had made her own
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Music was my iPod, plugged into stereo provided free by venue
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No pro photos/video: frankly I had sticker shock by that point, and I hate hate hate having my picture taken anyway
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Save-the-date was via Evite, and invitations were done online by Costco
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Programs were designed by us, and printed at Kinko’s
We spent a fraction of the so-called “average” American wedding, even in a high-cost metro area, and everyone had a blast. And people still comment that ours was the best wedding food they’d ever had - no rubber chicken!
This. My sister had… four or five? attendants and still bitches to this day that she paid for my dress. I was a single mom living paycheck to paycheck at the time. I didn’t ask to be in her wedding, it wasn’t my idea that her bridal party match all the way down to shoes, hair, and jewelry, and I’ve since thrown that hideous piece of fabric away, having never worn it again. It wasn’t even a proper “bridesmaid” dress, just a fancy dress off the rack of a general clothing store that cost her $60. Still, she complains. I would have preferred just not being in her wedding at all.
I’m having a single attendant*, first because I don’t have the same sense of obligation to let every woman I’ve ever met stand up next to me that some people have and the person I chose is special to me in a way that other people really are not, and second because I don’t want the expense of paying for 16 dresses. Because I am paying for her dress. I’m getting her input on color because it’s just her, and she gets to pick her own style because it’s just her, but it’s still an expense she wouldn’t have had except that I called her up one day and asked her to stand with me on my important day.
- Hint: it’s not my sister.
Thanks everyone. Some wonderful suggestions.
My top tip: Invite less people.
The honest truth is that most people find attending weddings a bit of an obligation, especially when it involves travel.
Invite the people who really want to be there, and who you really want to be there. Don’t worry about whether you’re balanced in terms of bride vs groom numbers, just go with the people who you really want to share your special day with.
The Bro heard through the local grapevine about a factory that makes “wedding details”, so he was able to buy “his” gifts from there. Unengraved, but everybody who got one remembers perfectly well where it was from. It was a letter opener/bottle opener: judging by the success, the only thing every single Y-gene owner appears to love more than a tool is two tools in one (I swear, the guys were all but squeeing - this includes the, uh, “State Surgeon General” and a consul).
For her gifts, we made them ourselves. The specific materials were culturally relevant to both spouses, but leaving that out, it amounted to “a ribbon holding together a lace-edged handkerchief containing hard candy”. Making 300 packages was a bitch, but the individual cost came to about 1/8 what stores charged.
Oh yeah, we had no “attendants” per se – I was 40 and didn’t really feel the need to have a MOH (and my sister, who would have been the logical one for that role, was being a total cow throughout the planning process anyway, which is a rant for another day) or a gaggle of bridesmaids. We had chuppah pole holders, that was it, and they wore whatever they felt like wearing. When they and our mothers asked what we wanted them to wear, I told them “wear whatever makes you feel festive.” I really couldn’t have cared less what everyone was wearing.
An idea, although it’s not something I did (and the one wedding I attended in the US didn’t have American-style attendants): get them to dress like regular guests. They have special roles, but that doesn’t mean the ladies have to dress like fugly candy… and from what I saw in bridal stores, the fugly candy tends to be more expensive than regular party dresses.
Hey, ninja’ed by Eva Luna 
SWMBO and I spent about $800 on ours. Half of that was the new dress she bought. The rest was catering, j.p., etc.
I would agree except that most of this thread disagrees with you.
Simply saying, “It’s for a wedding” doubles the price for the same item, service or venue. (If not a greater multiple.) The OP is a mom who doesn’t want to spend a fortune and is going to have a lot of trouble controlling the budget even with these suggestions.
I’m not name-calling those brides who want a sensible wedding; I’m saying the whole culture has become so extravagantly spendthrift on this matter that it’s borderline insanity. Like so many other consumer issues, it verges on impossibility to swim against the tide; even if you save money friends and family will never stop commenting on it, like praising a severely handicapped child who completes a modest footrace.
It is, indeed, the closest modern equivalent to potlatch (the extreme, late-stage and possibly apocryphal kind). I applaud those who try to keep things reasonable but I’ve watched many-many slide into budgets two and three times larger because they “had to.”
I don’t think we’re all reading the same thread. Or some are reading between lines or projecting.
Or, it just may be a case of YMMV.
Almost every good suggestion is specific advice to “go around” expectations or pricing levels. No projection needed.
Every woman owns a Little Black Dress, right? Just ask your bridesmaids to wear those. No, they won’t all be exactly the same style, but the whole point of a dress like that is it’s classy and goes with anything.
If you need for them to have something matching so they stand out, give them each an arm-bouquet of matching flowers, possibly dyed to a distinctive color.
We had an afternoon wedding with a catered lunch at a restaurant afterwards. We served wine and beer (noone really expects a full bar in the middle of the day). There wasn’t a DJ, party favors and we didn’t decorate the chapel. I had only a maid of honor and 50 guests. In addition to the cake, we had trays of cookies and brownies. It was dead on perfect.
In looking back, I didn’t need 10 bridesmaids or party favors or a DJ. I wouldn’t have remembered any of that in a year anyway. I had my best friend standing with me and all the people we loved the most there. I don’t think we missed a single thing.
We had a very inexpensive wedding for about 25 people, and it cost us around $3000. Every little thing you buy for a wedding adds up - candles for the tables, napkins, shoes, earrings, wine, tablecloths, wedding cake, venue rental fee, fee for the officiant, dresses and tuxes, food - everything.
Some people want to party with their relatives and friends. I don’t see the problem in having a party for a big occassion. People have birthday parties all the time. I had a party after my wedding because I wanted a party. Most people want parties. Some people want big parties, other people want affordable parties, some people don’t want parties.
You can blame the party mindset on social conditioning, sure, I guess that’s what it is at the core, but it’s so boorish to look at someone having fun at a party and say, “Well you know you didn’t HAVE to spend all this money. You know this is just society influencing you to celebrate life events right? You could’ve done this for a mere $50 license fee if society didn’t push you around so much!”
A person can both
- Want to party
- Do it affordably for a lot of people
and even
- Party stylishly
Without the secret cause being
- Didn’t really want to party but society forced them to via peer pressure
We saved quite a bit by going with a non-traditional venue, a coffee house. We paid for the location, staff, beer and corkage for the champagne toast. We used other caterers to deliver various food items, provided our own tunes via iPod, and had photographically inclined friends give us their services for the evening.
The local florist gave us a nice deal on flowers, no $2,000 wedding package there. The local bakery made up a nice, reasonably priced cake. Another friend, a restauranteur, provided the champagne as a gift. We bought champagne flutes from IKEA, which were less expensive than renting and the venue bought them off of us at the end of the event.
We also did a lot of the decorations of things, like favors, and invitations, ourselves. Took friggin’ forever, but they came out very nice.