I love receiving mail from my readers and I recently got a lovely email from my reader, Kunbi who is getting married….
I've been a keen visitor of your blog and I love it...always advertising to friends. I'm engaged and my fiancé & I have started planning our wedding. I know you said you were going to write stuff about wedding but could you talk about finances as I know nothing about what to save towards. Could you give estimates? e.g if i want a wedding for 300 people in UK, what should we be aiming for? or how can I find out. Many thanks and I pray God continues to bless your marriage. AMEN
Firstly congratulations on your up coming wedding! One thing to know is that every wedding is different. Some people have got married with £2k and some have spent £20k. It all depends on your budget and how much you are prepared to spend.
Everyone tells you to sit down and work out your budget first but this can be really difficult if you don’t know how much things cost. We had over 500 people at our wedding and didn’t have a first clue about how much a wedding of this size would come to.
The first thing I did was download a budget planner {Wedding Chaos has a Wedding Budget template you can use}, this was so that I could identify the areas where we would need to spend money for the wedding. I then began to do research about the costs of different things using the internet, making calls and speaking to other brides and newlyweds. Once this was done we were able to compile our budget. We then compared this to funds available and tailored it accordingly.
Breaking it Down
The biggest expense you will face on your big day is your venue and/or food/drink. They typically come to around 40-50% of your budget. As your venue is central to proceedings if you can find an affordable venue, it will really help with your overall budget. I know people who got married in their local church and had their reception there has well, as they had a big hall. Cost – zero as it is their home church, so it really depends on your circumstances.
After that you will have things like your attire and photographer which again their prices will depend on what you go for.
It’s hard to provide estimates for things because price is reflective on what you go for and where you live {London is far more expensive than Manchester say} but I can give you some tips which helped us. One of the best pieces of advice given to us was, was that we should come up with a list of things that are non-negotiable. These are things which you must have/include in the wedding. The reason for this is that when it comes to having to make choices about particular things you know how far to budge. If it is a non-negotiable then you fight for it, if not you can let it go. Also remember that nothing is yours until you put down your deposit as in most cases this confirms your booking.
Another thing is about expectations and comparisons. Every wedding is different. Every bride and groom are different. It can be very easy to get sucked into a Wedding Industrial Complex and start to feel like you must have ‘x’ or ‘y’ because you have seen on The Knot or Martha Stewart weddings. Those places are great sources of inspiration, but that is what they should be…inspiration. If you’re starting to feel that your wedding won’t match up or is inadequate, requiring you to spend more money than planned, stop reading those magazines and blogs because your wedding is about creating the day unique to you and your fiancé.
So without further ado here are my tips on ways to save money planning your wedding:
1. Design your own wedding stationery or get someone who can*. It definitely saves you money when you have a lot of guests. I designed all our wedding stationery from 'save the dates', invites, wedding programme and thank you cards and my dad printed them all. If you have design skills definitely have a go, buy some card and print yourself. Ghenet over at teneleventen created her invites and they looked amazing.
2. Utilise the internet. You can get some great deals on everything using the internet. Ebay is especially good for things (picked up coloured envelopes really cheaply on there) as well as sites from overseas if you have enough time to wait for the items to come.
3. Don't forget the obvious places. We got some fantastic items from Ikea as well as local thrift stores. My wedding planner was very financially savvy and picked up some great bargains that we use to decorate the hall.
4. Negotiate with your vendors. My husband and I agreed that whatever price a vendor gave us, that would be our starting point to work down. This was not because we did not value their service, far from it. We had a budget which we wanted to stay within but valued the skills of certain individuals and wanted to work with them. In those cases we strip things away from the original package quoted in order to keep the price down. For our photographs for instance we just booked Jide to shoot our wedding and provide the photos on a disc rather than the whole album package which we can always do at a later date.
5. People are very talented. People will offer their help, accept it. Our cake was made for free, our DJ was free. Our wedding rings were a gift and our Videographer was free. You might have friends who are skilled in certain areas, don’t be afraid to accept their help.
6. Cut out the un-neccessaries that don't matter to you. Focus on the things that are important to you as a couple. For us that meant not using real napkins, real flowers or having boutonnieres for the men.
7. Skips the favours. Controversial? Maybe. Save you money? Definitely. If you can avoid to give out favours great if you can’t it won’t take anything away from your wedding. We didn’t have favours but we did give gifts to the people who bought the ase-obi.
8. Look out for deals. I was browsing Gumtree one day and saw an advert from a video company who were advising for couples getting married in the next month. They normally shoot documentaries but were now looking to move into weddings. In exchange for being used in their promotional material (e.g. Website) they would shoot the wedding for free. Slaters where we hired the suits for the men had an offer that if you hire so many suits they give you one free. That helped bring the overall cost of the suits down.
9. Be prepared to think outside the box, especially when it comes to venues. Had our numbers been smaller like yours, our choice of affordable venues would have dramatically increased. We discovered that a lot of schools and Universities have fantastic great halls at affordable prices. Speak to them about what they can offer and be prepared to be visionary and think about how you can transform the place.
10. Use your own caterers. One venue we saw which was available for our date wouldn’t let us use our own caterers and wanted to charge £55 a head to make their version of Nigerian food! Even after hosting a Nigerian wedding recently and receiving poor reports about the quality and authenticity of the food, they still refused to allow us to bring our own food. So we said goodbye to them. This will definitely save you money than going thorough your venue and you can control the menu.
11. For decoration be creative. Visit craft stores for inspiration. Hobbycraft is very good for this.
12. You don't have to purchase all you bridal accessories from the same store. Feel free to tap up Etsy where there are lots of creative people who make great items. My bolero was made by the lovely Joy Kelley of ‘How Joyful’ who has her own blog and Etsy shop. Don’t be afraid to buy things from overseas (point 2) as the exchange rate can work in your favour.
13. If you have time, purchase wedding items as and when you see them rather than the last few weeks before the wedding as you can grab some bargain in the sales.
14. Get married in your local church {or the local church of a close relative} as they won’t charge you or charge you as much.
16. Bridesmaid dresses: You can either get your girls to purchase an outfit from the high street {my friend Mel got a great bargain on Coast dresses as she bought them off season} OR buy some fabric you like and get a seamstress to make them for you. Either way it works out much more cost effective. If you need a good tailor in Manchester, drop me a line.
17. Make use of the great technology around. We hosted our wedding on mywedding.com and with that we were able to set up online RSVP which gave people the opportunity to respond to us quickly. We used wufoo to collate everyone’s full names and addresses {you can also do the same using Google Docs). Both of these things didn’t cost anything and as they say time is money, so anywhere you can save yourself time is also of benefit to you.
Hope this helps Kunbi!
Useful Links
I’m sure other people have great money saving tips for weddings, please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.
If you have your own wedding or relationship questions, please drop me a line.
* Happy to provide any assistance in this area. Please get in touch.
{Picture source from here and Jide Alakija}
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