Keep wedding costs down
From my own experience, I know it can feel like whenever you mention the word wedding, everyone seems to add a massive chunk to their fees. However, there are ways and means of keeping your costs down while still having an amazing day!
Make things yourself
Great at interior design? Design your own table decorations and source your supplies.
Do you have some deep seated artistic flare? Design your own invitations, Menus and time tables.
Talk to your friends and family
Speak to friends and family to see if there is anything they would like to help you with. My Brother is a chef and made our wedding cake, my Grandma won awards for her flowering arrangements and made my wife’s bouquet.
Embrace Kintsugi
Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with gold and silver.
If you are looking for the perfect bridal jewellery, maybe look to get something of great importance repurposed. Maybe your Grandma has some opal earrings that could be repurposed into a beautiful necklace?
Cufflinks - you can turn pretty much anything into cufflinks, breathing new life into something with meaning.
eBay and Etsy are your friends
When you see something you like, research it. There are loads of sole traders producing some wonderful things and selling their wares through Etsy and EBay.
“It looks beautiful, but is it worth the calories?” Pru from Great British Bake Off
I know we want it but do we really need it? For example (and I know I’ll get some grief for this) The doughnut wall - a wonderful wall of yummy treats or slightly stale and potential germ magnets?
Some times less is more…?
Cost / Benefit Analysis
Yeah I know, sorry for the corporate word bingo but I just wanted to put this thought in your head. If you are going to make something like your own invitations, spare a moment of thought before you begin as to the amount of work involved.
If you have 80 guests, and they are all couples, that means you have to make 40 invites. If each invite takes 15 minutes to cut out, write and stick together then 40 x 15 minutes equals a butload of time (10 hours).
Then you have to post or hand deliver them.
Katie and I were discussing our wedding before writing this article. Upon reflection, Katie said that although it did save us a good chunk of money, the time, effort and stress wasn’t worth it.
Let me leave you on a cautionary tale…
We tried to save money on photography (sounds a little stupid coming from me doesn’t it? In my defence we got married before I really got back into photography).
Well, anyway, we decided we didn’t need photos of the evening. We would just have a ton of disposable cameras and leave them on the tables for our friends to use.
Big mistake. Huge.
The photos were crap. Poorly exposed because it was dark and these things didn’t come with any light metering. Rubbish framing, no thoughts to composition. Out of 20 cameras we had about 10 useable photos, even then they were pretty poor.
Lesson learnt...
