Wedding Advice on a budget

[Meresgi]

Trying to plan a wedding around $2000-$3000 budget here in Columbia Maryland and watching my fiance tear her hair out so I was wondering what all advice there is out there for reducing the cost on a lot of this shit? As a typical guy, I don't know shit about this, and to me a wedding could be in the backyard with a BBQ and thats that. Fiance wants something "nice", not super fancy and formal with doves and 8 grand worth of flowers, but she also doesnt want...well a wedding in the backyard with a BBQ.

Every place we're looking at around the area is crazy fucking expensive since its Columbia, MD. So my 1st question would be, how much a drive to a location is TOO much for wedding guests? We plan on doing the wedding in October and on a Sunday. We're not sure on outdoor or indoor, I know outdoor is probably cheaper but she's afraid of it raining and ruining the entire wedding.

Any advice on saving money would be greatly helpful short of "go to Vegas" or "Justice of the Peace" since she wants the wedding and I dont want her stabbing me in my sleep over not having a wedding 10 yrs from now lol.

[hey]

Have the wedding in your back yard with a BBQ, and a nice cake.

[Tyche]

If I could do it all over again, I'd get married at the court house and take the thousands of dollars we wasted on the single day ceremony and spend it in a couple of bungalows in Bora Bora pver the course of a week.

[Reuniont]

If I could do it all over again, I'd get married at the court house and take the thousands of dollars we wasted on the single day ceremony and spend it in a couple of bungalows in Bora Bora pver the course of a week.

Good god, this.

OP:
Do you have anything set in stone yet?
How many people do you expect to be at the wedding?

[tyven]

dump her for a chick with a family that can pay for a nice wedding, that is how its supposed to be.

[Anoat]

If you and your fiancee don't have an aversion to getting married in a church, do it in a small church. Most churches won't charge you for using the space for your wedding (provided you do the decorations yourself and clean up afterwards) and will probably also let you use their reception area for free as well. If there aren't any churches like that in your area, or you just don't want to do it at a church, you can probably rent out a local American Legion Post for something like $100-$200 for a few hours. If you can't afford catering for a nice wedding dinner, enlist your family to do a lot of the cooking for you. Failing that, skip the dinner and go with finger foods and cake only. You can forego the live band or DJ because seriously I am sure you know at least one person with an Apple device and dock with speakers. And in this day and age of e-mails, facebook, and twitter you can skip buying invitations completely unless you just want to order a few for keepsakes. Forget the wedding photographer and hire a friend that is somewhat decent with photography, pay them with beers or whatever.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Save money. Don't get married.

[Sepukku]

Save money. Don't get married.

/thread.

[Sepukku]

Have you tried hitting your fiance with a water bottle?

[Seanr]

Check out how much Martins Crosswind is in greenbelt, that's where my sister got married back in summer of 06, we're not leaking money out the ass by any means. We did it outdoors though there.

[Brill Weave]

Preface, my wife and I got married four years ago and we did it for just under four thousand. My wife is dictating to me right now. She has been involved in numerous weddings that were under four thousand dollars, helping to plan all of them. Here is what she says.

1. Check local parks for the wedding and the reception - Most parks have indoor banquet halls. Our venue was rented out for 150.00 dollars for the entire day.

2. Flowers - Go to Joann Fabrics or Michael's craft store. Make bouquets and boutineers from fake flowers. This is MUCH cheaper(cost us around 60 dollars.)

3. Fall wedding - We had a fall wedding as well. We used cheap vases filled with water with fake leaves floating in them along with a floating candle. We used the remaining leaves and scattered them on each table.

4. Cake was made by a friend but I doubt you'll be lucky enough to have a friend in the pastry industry. So in that case Costco makes wedding cakes that are very cheap in comparison to actual bakeries.

5. Name tags - We used mini topiary trees(about 2 1/2 inches tall) as both the table seating charts and as a favor. The trees had a small clip that allowed us to put name tags and table seating in them. Lined them up at the door. They were about .50 each.

6. Catering - Use a small local caterer. They are usually cheaper and because they are smaller, can't afford to fuck up the meal as they rely on word of mouth. This will be the most expensive part of your wedding. We had about 75 people at our wedding and ending up paying about 900 dollars.

7. Booze - We bought all our own booze(spent about 400 dollars on it.) 2 1/2 kegs of beer. The rest was whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila(only 2 bottles) and a couple bottles of wine. We still had about 100 dollars worth of liquor left. Our friend's daughters ending up tending bar for us. If you ask around to some of your friends most will know someone who is willing to tend bar for tips.

8. Transportation - We had a large wedding party, so we decided to forego getting a limo and had to get a large 24 passenger conversion van. It's a fuckload cheaper. But you will need a sober driver.

9. Kitchen utensils/miscellaneous stuff - We got all silverware, dinnerware from Sam's Club. We also got all of our mixers there in bulk.

10. Music - My best friend brought along his laptop and plugged it into the speaker system and just let his iTunes play the entire night. One of our friends announced us as we all arrived.

11. Photographer - Spent 1500 on this asshole and the pictures my cousin took turned out infinitely better. Just have friends take an assload of pictures.

That's all she can think of right now. Let your fiancee know it can be done on a 2k - 3k budget but you should expect it to be closer to 3k. Our friends got married for 2k almost right on the nose. But their catering was pizza and wings.

[Tekki]

Futurewife and I are in the same boat right now. The food is the most expensive part....

[Aksannyi]

I have no advice as far as cost goes, but one of my greatest regrets when I look back on my marriage to my ex-husband is that we did not have a wedding. If it's something that your wife wants, please don't try to get her to settle. Eventually I may get married again and I may have a beautiful (not overly extravagant) wedding, but as of right now, I'm 31 years old, I've not even got any prospects on the horizon as far as getting married again, and I still wish that I'd had the whole white dress walking down the aisle deal when I did it the first time.

With all that said, ask people that you know. Maybe someone's mom is a florist and can hook you up with a deal. Maybe someone's cousin is a photographer. You'd be surprised what you can find for great prices if you ask people in your circle.

Save money. Don't get married.

But I seriously can't argue with this, my first marriage was a failure, and I'm in no rush to do it again.

[Brill Weave]

The food is the most expensive part....

It doesn't have to be that bad. If you really look around you can find a small restaurant/caterer that will be much more reasonable than larger groups. We had initially gotten quotes all over 1500 dollars and ended up only paying 900 so it can be done. The food was fantastic as well.

[Skjie]

10. Music - My best friend brought along his laptop and plugged it into the speaker system and just let his iTunes play the entire night. One of our friends announced us as we all arrived.

11. Photographer - Spent 1500 on this asshole and the pictures my cousin took turned out infinitely better. Just have friends take an assload of pictures.

These. Spent no money on a photographer, but still my friend's pictures were way better.

[Ksandra]

Brill hit a lot of major parts, so I won't repeat what he said, but I'll just add to it. Mine wedding goal was 5k and ended up around 6k plus the honeymoon (for 80~ guests), but considering that's in Cali I think I did pretty well. (b'')b

Anyway, outside of venues at parks/churches, you could also check out senior community centers. I got lucky as the town my wedding was in had a brand new center that was built. They had a hall specifically for receptions/events to help fund the center, so I was one of the firsts to get to use it and it was definitely cheaper than a hotel hall yet just as nice.

As for food, you could see if you can do what we did though not sure how easy it is in MD. Since hubby is Filipino, they're big into Lechun (roasted pig on a spit). They ordered a huge one for about $150 which is meant to feed 100 people. I then spent money getting side dishes from Boston Market catering (mashed potatoes, rolls). I bought those premade salad packets from the grocery store and had a bowl filled with it. LOL then for the vegetarians/kids, I bought 6 of those stouffer's lasagnas, cooked them the day before, then had them reheated in the hall's kitchen the day of.

I did it reception style, and got two kids I used to tutor to just monitor (ie replace lasagnas/salad as needed) for $40 each telling them they could eat w/e they wanted.


As for flowers, ya those are the ones that are going to kill you. Remember though with shit like that YOU CAN HAGGLE. That's exactly what wedding planners do, and so florists are used to it. Keep flowers to a minimum. We did the whole floating candles in vases for center pieces which were beautiful and wayyy ass cheaper (can even usually find vases at a $1 store).


Learn to love Micheal's as well, things like decorations/invitations become way cheaper when you do it yourself. I never understood couples who spend thousands of dollars on just the invitations. Reality is, the only people who will ever keep it is you, and possibly your parents. People hold them long enough to have the directions/times, and when that's done it goes in the garbage.



Oh and as for the honeymoon. I know you didn't mention it, but if you don't have an idea yet, we did a Carnival cruise. For the two of us it was $1600, but that is all-inclusive, you don't have to spend a penny afterwards if you don't want to, making it a really cheap week vacation, and definitely a nice experience. Warning with that though, there are days where the boat gets docked at port and they have activities on-shore you can do (ie swimming with dolphins, horse-back riding), and that shit is expensive (average was $100 per person). But the boat still has food/pools/spas n' shit. Those days we just kept relaxing on the boat and enjoyed having the pool practically to ourselves.

It's been awhile so if I think of more shit I'll post, but reality is it's not that hard to do a budget wedding that's really nice, as long as you're willing to create most of the stuff yourself.

[edit] just remembered too. As something similar someone said with music, if you subscribe to the Zune music program it's $15 a month. They have a computer app so you don't need a Zune, but the deal is you can d/l as many songs as you want onto your computer that get auto deleted at the end of the month (you get to keep 10 each month though).

So we signed up for one month, then d/l the fuck out of every song we could think of.


As for photographer, I found one that did it for $500 on Craig's List and he did an awesome job. Sometimes it easier to find cheap ones because there are kids who are photography majors in college that are trying to make money on the side.

[Brill Weave]

We went to Punta Cana for 5 days/4 nights at Iberostar resorts which are all inclusive. It ran us about 1600 as well.

[Tyche]

I have no advice as far as cost goes, but one of my greatest regrets when I look back on my marriage to my ex-husband is that we did not have a wedding. If it's something that your wife wants, please don't try to get her to settle. Eventually I may get married again and I may have a beautiful (not overly extravagant) wedding, but as of right now, I'm 31 years old, I've not even got any prospects on the horizon as far as getting married again, and I still wish that I'd had the whole white dress walking down the aisle deal when I did it the first time.

With all that said, ask people that you know. Maybe someone's mom is a florist and can hook you up with a deal. Maybe someone's cousin is a photographer. You'd be surprised what you can find for great prices if you ask people in your circle.



But I seriously can't argue with this, my first marriage was a failure, and I'm in no rush to do it again.

If you had a wedding, your biggest regret would be that you had a wedding.

As far as costs, we had friends (who are pro photographers) shoot the wedding and we gave them $500. DJ was about $700, venue was quite expensive, forgot exact amounts, because we paid for Both a park (for the ceremony) and a museum (for the reception). Her parents prepared the food and it was fucking good, as good as any catered wedding I've been to. Most of our money was spent on jewelry, venues, decor (that tiny shit adds up) and the dress.

Funny story (or not so funny), my wife was so excited on the big day that she forgot all her jewelry that we had spent a fuckton of money on. At least she remembered the ring. She borrowed jewelry from a (quite wealthy) friend that was attending, so we made out all right.

[Tajin]

If I could do it all over again, I'd get married at the court house and take the thousands of dollars we wasted on the single day ceremony and spend it in a couple of bungalows in Bora Bora pver the course of a week.

This, this this this this

[Zansho]

Wow. Did you ask the $1,500 wedding photographer to see their work? Did they show you an ENTIRE wedding from start to finish, not just "the greatest hits" stuff? Did they provide any references from previous clients? Any photographer worth their salt and money (and believe me, $1,500 is CHEAP for a GOOD wedding photographer) will be able to provide you with all this info.

I've shot many weddings in my career as a professional photographer, and I start at $1,700 for 4 hours of coverage (with other things included). While you think photographers might be ridiculously expensive for what you perceive they do - just click a shutter button - we actually do a LOT more than just that. I won't go into all of the costs of doing business, post production and the whole shebang, but the average 8 hour wedding shindig is actually about 35-40 hours of work for a good photographer who knows what the heck they're doing.

That being said, back to the topic at hand. If you're looking to do things on the cheap, you need to evaluate what's important to you. Some people place a premium on food and cake and booze, some on the venue, some on the dress, flowers, whatever. You have to prioritize what's the first thing you would like to have that's really important to you, and put your money towards that. I think I've spent maybe.. 9 grand on my wedding. Venue, Cake, Photographer, DJ, her dress, our rings, all that. We eliminated booze because quite simply, we have too many alcoholics in my family and I didn't want them to go home drunk or cause a scene at my wedding (which they're known for when they're drunk) - that helped cut down on the costs a lot.

We ordered our own flowers, and cut out the florist - did all the work for the floral decorations ourselves. That saved us like 800 bucks right there with all the work involved. I have many colleagues who are also photographers, and I've worked with many of them - and since I know how to do my own post production and editing, and I already have the resources to make my own albums and whatnot, I just paid one of my colleagues whose work I felt was the best suited for our venue to just shoot the wedding, and hand me unedited high resolution .TIFF files. Granted, MOST photographers won't do this, but in my case, I was able to swing that.

My point is, you probably know someone who can help you out with some areas of the wedding, to help you save money. Decide on what's important to you, and go from there. Despite whatever you might say about it being expensive, realize at the same time, you get what you pay for. This isn't an condemnation on you wanting to do a low budget wedding - it's more of to say you just need to focus your money on the important things you BOTH want. You are, after all, getting married!