5 Easy Ways To Cut Your Wedding Spending

Saving money on your wedding can be way easier than you think. Let's walk through how to theoretically save over $5,000 on your wedding!

I got married to my soul mate back in August and, being that we were mostly paying for our own wedding, we had to cut costs anywhere we could. Here are a few of the ways I found to save quite a bit of money. I will go through and say about how much I saved by doing those things. P.S. I had a small-scale family and close friends kind of wedding. The wedding cost maybe $3,500 including dress, catering, etc.

Plastic tablecloths are guacamole proof ;)

Don't rent your tablecloths!

I don't know about your local rental places, but mine was a reasonably priced place in the first place BUT tablecloths would have cost me about $400 more for 10 tables. Now they do have to dry clean them, they are nice tablecloths, and accidents can happen and you could ruin that expensive tablecloth. If you can, and it won't "kill" you, I would honestly just go buy plastic tablecloths from dollar tree. They're only a dollar and if you ruin them, you ruin them. So $400 vs. $10.....

$390 saved

Home just feels more personal and intimate, not to mention it's easier to get ready at your own house!

Backyard Bash!

If you have the space at home, or know someone who would let you have your wedding on their property, then do it there. Outdoor weddings are much easier to decorate and photograph anyways. Average venues in my area are about $2,500-$4,000. My venue was free. We are lucky enough to have 99 acres to have a wedding on, but you don't actually need that much space. If you have a roomy backyard, that works too. If you have a pasture, that also works. Know somebody with a big garden? Ask them to do the ceremony there.

$3,000 saved

The smaller the guest list, the more time you can spend with your loved ones on your special day!

Cut The List Down

Do you really need to invite literally every person you know? Does Debbie from the local gas station HAVE to be there? No. Make a list, then chop it in half. Knock off people who might not come anyways. Knock off anyone you don't even want there. Knock off anyone who would stress the couple out (besides the wedding party lol .) It costs about $15 a person to feed depending on the food you chose. The simpler, the better. We had tacos, rice, and beans from our favorite local Mexican food truck. So let's say my list was about 150 people at first, I knocked it down to around 100 and then i planned for around 80 and even less showed up, so realistically I could have saved even more. so the difference between 150 people and 80 is over $1,000 worth of food.

$1,050 saved

Customizing as much as you can makes your wedding way more memorable and fun.

Get A Custom Dress!

I looked and looked and looked and found a ton of dresses I liked but every time I found something, it was a stupid price. One day I was scrolling through Aliexpress and saw a dress with over a thousand reviews and over 3,000 purchases and it was super cute. All the reviews were great. The only complaints were a few loose threads, which I could deal with. I ended up buying a dress for about $54 on Aliexpress. It came in the mail about a month later and I ended up ordering rhinestones and taking it to a seamstress to altered it to my body and changed out some details and added rhinestones. It turned out great and I don't feel bad about only wearing it one time and getting it muddy. My dress was $54 plus $50 for alterations (prices vary by seamstress obviously). So in total, after rhinestones, my dress cost about $115. Wedding dresses can be super duper expensive but I wasn't spending more than $2,000.

$1,885 saved

It's not about how much you spend, it's about how you use the stuff.

Nobody expects you to buy expensive candle-holders!

Go to Dollar Tree, go to Dollar General, go to thrift stores and flea markets. Go to yard sales, etc. Find pieces to fit your theme and/or colors and save yourself major money. I also used Wish, Aliexpress, and Amazon for almost everything I couldn't find in person. A good example is something like centerpieces. You can go full glam and have everything match and be so so OR you can DIY mix and match and it can add a touch of personality to your wedding and also save you a ton of money. Let's say you find some super cute and fancy centerpiece and they're only like $20 a piece, not bad right? That is until you remember you have to buy multiples. If you had 10 tables, you need at least 8 or so. so 8 tables at 15 bucks is $160. Still, not bad but not cheap. and these are to the lower end of pricing by the way. Ok now let's say you found 8 vases, and flowers and filler from Dollar Tree and Amazon etc. You're probably only going to spend like $30 in all the materials. That's over a hundred bucks you could spend on something else right there.

$130 saved

So let's check out how much we could theoretically save by doing just these few things. We saved $390 by switching to plastic tablecloth, $3,000 by having the wedding and reception at home or somewhere "free", $1,050 by cutting down on guests, $1,885 by buying a budget dress and customizing it, and finally we saved $130 by being cheap with the decor. That's a total saving of $6,455!

Happy Wedding Planning!

Alright, that's what I have for now, I will keep putting lists together and I will probably release another wedding budget post. If you have any self planning questions, feel free to drop them in the comments, or dm me on the facebook page.

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