Bring Your Wedding in Under Budget

Weddings are expensive. Today, it would be very easy for a young couple to spend more money on their wedding festivities than they would to put a down payment on their first house, and without question more on their wedding than on their first family sedan. So, how do you plan the perfect wedding without blowing your budget, as well as the budgets of close family members and friends? There are tricks to planning a wedding under budget, corners to cut, as it were, without sacrificing quality.

Friends and family
Employ friends and family to do things for your wedding that you would normally have to pay someone to do. Aunt Helen has been photographing activities and events for her church for the past thirty years, she may be willing to photograph, at the very least, your wedding ceremony. And Aunt Grace's favorite hobby is decorating cakes and even sells them for extra cash. Of course, you have to be understanding if they would rather observe your wedding festivities than participate in them, but it never hurts to ask.

Be crafty
This is another avenue where you can employ friends and family, if you aren't crafty on your own. A ream of decorative parchment paper will cost you in the neighborhood of $10 to $15, colored ink for an ink jet printer, $30. You can easily spend less than $100, most likely less than $50, to print your own wedding invitations, invitations that may cost anywhere from $200 to $500 or more depending on how many you want and where you get them from, to have them professionally printed. And doing it yourself means you can also use the computer printer to address your envelopes, something that will add to the cost of your professionally printed wedding invitations.

Make your own bouquets and floral arrangements. Fresh flowers in the wedding are definitely desirable to many brides but silk flowers offer one more avenue for wedding party keepsakes. And not only are they considerably less expensive but also offer a wider variety of choices, such as out-of-season or rare wedding flowers, or colors that a florist may have to create (hiking up the price a little bit more to do so).