If you’re in the process of planning your big day, you’ll have probably already noticed that weddings don’t come cheap. From venue hire to dresses and entertainment to food costs, there seems to be an endless list of outgoings that mount up week by week. So how can you save money on your wedding and ensure you have the day of your dreams without breaking the bank? There are actually some very simple ways to save your pennies and bring your dream wedding day within reach. We’ve listed our favourite budget wedding ideas below and really hope you make some mega savings! Good luck!
Book A Weekday Wedding
There are some huge savings (we’re talking thousands!) to be made if you book your wedding on a Monday-Thursday. These are the least popular days for weddings and venues often discount their prices quite substantially to attract bookings. If you’re looking to save money on your wedding, booking a weekday is a great way to start. Saturdays are by far the most expensive day of the week for weddings, so steer clear if you can!
Get Married Out Of Peak Season
In a similar vein to booking on a weekday, there are certain times of the year that are cheaper too. Peak season is between May and September, so with the exception of Christmas time, you’ll probably find that venues are cheaper during the rest of the year.
Consider An Evening Wedding
A great money saving idea for your wedding is to get hitched later in the day. It means that you’ll only need to provide one meal for your guests, for example a simple buffet. Without needing to shell out for an entire wedding breakfast, the cost of your day can be dramatically reduced.
Make Great Choices With Your Wedding Entertainment
It goes without saying that you will need some form of live entertainment at your wedding. You might be pleasantly surprised to hear that you can easily find solo and duo musicians who have the same floor-filling magnetism of a full band, but at a fraction of the cost. Some will use loop pedals or backing tracks to achieve a huge sound that your guests will love. Alternatively, a DJ will often work out cheaper than hiring a wedding band and is a great way of filling your dance floor.
If you’re interested in finding out more, click to learn about how to save money on your wedding entertainment.
Ditch The Wedding Stationery
Instead of sending out pricey wedding invitations and save the date cards, use technology to your advantage and send out personalised digital invites instead. You could record a video for your guests, outlining all the main details of your big day, and direct them to a wedding website you’ve created yourself. These are often totally free and are a fantastic way of providing your guests with all the information they need and allow your guests to RSVP without spending any money at all. Save your pennies and the planet at the same time!
Get Married and Have Your Reception At The Same Place
If you want to save as much money on your wedding as possible, this one is a no brainer. For starters, there are no transportation costs for shipping guests between venues. Secondly, you’ll only need to pay one fee for hiring the venue. It makes perfect sense to keep everything in one place and makes sorting logistics so much easier as well!
Do You Really Need A Designer Dress?
You’ve probably dreamt of your wedding dress since you were little and have a good idea what you would like it to look like. Unfortunately, you might not have given much thought until now about how much your dream dress is likely to cost. Designer boutiques might stock some gorgeous gowns, but they certainly don’t come cheap! In order to save money on your wedding dress, you’re going to have to think outside the box.
Vintage stores often stock some one-of-a-kind beauties for starters. It’s definitely worth checking out their eclectic selection of dresses every so often. You never know what you might find! Second hand wedding dresses are a big thing right now. There are several online shops that sell stunning designer dresses at tiny prices if you don’t mind it having been worn before. Or maybe you could wear your mum’s dress?
Online stores regularly stock wedding gowns at a fraction of the price of the designer ones. There are hundreds, if not thousands of pounds worth of savings to be made if you are happy to forego the designer dress. If you simply can’t imagine your big day without the dress of your dreams, some dress shops will let you buy the store sample dress at a reduced price, especially if it is the end of a line. Another budget wedding idea is to follow bridal designer’s social media accounts, because when they announce sample sales, you can often bag a bargain for 50-60% less than the RRP!
Warning: Bridesmaids are expensive!
Image Credit:Leo Sharp Photography
In the UK, it’s traditional that the bride pays for their bridesmaid’s dresses, shoes and accessories, which might come as a surprise if you are reading this from across the pond, where bridesmaids are normally expected to pay for everything themselves.
With the average price of a bridesmaid dress standing currently at £114, having lots of bridesmaids isn’t going to work if you’re on a tight budget, especially when you consider the cost of shoes and bouquets as well! By choosing a very small number of carefully selected bridesmaids you’ll be keeping your costs down. So what about the dresses themselves? Bridal boutiques are going to be pricey but you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the quality and competitive prices supplied by online retailers. For around £40 you can find beautiful dresses that look far more expensive than they actually are.
If your budget is super tight, you can always explain to your bridesmaids that you’d like them to pay for their own stuff. They are your friends and family and they love you, so of course they will! This actually happens in around 25% of UK weddings so it’s certainly not unheard of!
Suits Don’t Have To Be Bought
Photo Credit: Zoé Harris Photography
Suits are expensive, and buying them for all your groomsmen is going to hike costs up no end! However, hiring suits is a much more budget-friendly idea and will ensure that the men at your wedding look just as dapper. Alternatively, ask your groomsmen if they can wear their own suits.
Borrow What You Can
You need something borrowed anyway right? Ask around your friends and family to see what they can lend you for your big day. Someone is likely to have some stunning jewellery, a veil they wore at their own wedding or some table decorations left over from their big day. They’ll only have been used once so are likely to be in great condition. By using this budget wedding idea, the amount you can save is unlimited!
Keep Your Guest List Small
It goes without saying that the fewer guests you invite, the fewer meals and drinks you need to provide. Start by making a list of who you absolutely HAVE to invite. We’re talking parents, grandparents, siblings and best friends. After that, seriously consider the reasons for inviting everyone else. If you can’t imagine your wedding day without them being there, they should make the list. If you haven’t spoken to them recently, perhaps they don’t need to be there. Steer clear of allowing plus ones as well! Costs can soon start mounting as guest lists expand.
Arrange Your Own Flowers
Wedding flowers are extremely expensive if bought from a florist. But is it the arrangement or the flowers themselves that look beautiful? Of course it’s the flowers. Buying supermarket flowers and arranging them yourself the night before is definitely an option if your budget doesn’t stretch to professional arrangements. Some types of flowers look great on their own and don’t need much arranging at all such as the ever-popular Baby’s Breath. Even a single stem can fill a small vase and it’s easy to tie with cord for a simple bouquet.
Repurpose Your Flowers
Think about where you want to use your flowers. If you use them during your ceremony on the table where you sign the register, could the same arrangement be moved onto the head table for your reception? Why not hang buckets or jars of flowers along your aisle then reinvent them as centrepieces for your tables?
Use Candles Instead Of Flowers
For an even cheaper alternative to flowers, candles look stunning at weddings, are readily available and require very little set-up!
Use Your Contacts
As with most things, when it comes to saving money on your wedding, it’s not what you know but who you know. Use your friends and family’s help with everything that you can. Maybe your sister knows how to do calligraphy for your wedding signage, or your friend should be on the Bake Off and could make your wedding cake. When you work out what skills and contacts your friends and family have to offer, you’ll be surprised how much you can save on your wedding!
Scrap The Three Course Meal
It’s becoming increasingly popular at weddings to have a more laid-back style of dining. In the summer, barbecues go down a treat with guests and are being offered as an alternative to three-course meals by an growing number of venues. The best part is – they are much cheaper as well!
For festival themed weddings (or any style of wedding in fact), food trucks are often a cheaper way of feeding everyone and always go down well with guests. Grazing tables are a trendy choice with budget-savvy couples as they are easy to make yourself with a few supermarket-bought items and look classy into the bargain!
For dessert, why not ask guests to bring a cake or biscuits for a bake-off style pudding table? You could even have judges! Alternatively, an ice-cream truck is cheap to hire, will go down a storm and provide some excellent photo opportunities.
Provide Your Own Alcohol
Many venues will allow you to provide your own drinks and this will almost always work out cheaper than having them provided as part of a package deal. Check to see if there is a corkage charge (where you have to pay a charge to the venue for allowing you to BYOB). Even with this additional cost, it can still work out much cheaper, so do the maths and work out what’s best for you!
Uber It
It’s a little-known fact that Uber provides a luxury car service. By selecting their luxury cars at the time of booking you will be sent a high-end car that will make you feel like royalty on your way to your wedding! With models from Rolls Royce, Tesla and Bentley available, you’ll get there in style, at a fraction of the price of hiring a wedding car.
Save Hundreds On Your Cake
You don’t have to have a four-tired masterpiece for your wedding cake. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly popular not to. From cakes made of cheese, to cupcake and donut towers, alternative wedding cakes are all the rage right now. Twelve donuts cost around £14 and you can get a tower to display them on to make your cake for around £30 online. Cupcakes are even cheaper and are also easy to make yourself. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that there are hundreds of pounds to be saved doing it this way and it’s so much fun too. Win win!
Track Everything
We mean EVERYTHING. From the price of your wedding venue to your bridesmaid’s hair slides. Every little expenditure will add up, so to keep on top of it, we’d recommend setting a total budget and creating a spreadsheet to track it all. Set up a tab for each type of spending e.g. food, venue, entertainment, outfits etc and set your budget for each. Make sure both you and your partner can edit it and off you go! You’ll probably find that having to enter the price of each item your spend money on into the spreadsheet will make you make conscious decisions to spend wisely, so it can only be a good thing.
Get Your Guests To Capture The Day
If a wedding photographer is out of your budget, there are some great ways of capturing all the candid moments that you’d otherwise miss. In fact, we’d recommend you do the following even if you have hired a photographer. Provide cheap single-use cameras at your tables so your guests can take hilarious photos. You’ll never capture this kind of insanity with a wedding photographer we promise. You could also create your own hashtag and make it clearly visible to your guests. Ask them to upload all their shots of the day using the hashtag so you can see them after the big day! A similar method of collecting all their photos is to ask them to share them to a Google Images file.
Scrap The Wedding Favours
Wedding favours these days often vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the truth is, you don’t need them at all. Nobody is going to get angry or disappointed if they don’t get a tiny jar of jam or personalised bubbles. They will genuinely just be happy to be there celebrating your special day with you. If you feel like you have to provide something, choose something really cheap like some Love Hearts. Cute AND budget friendly!
Ask For Money For Your Honeymoon
With wedding costs spiralling, if you have enough money left over for a honeymoon you’ll be in a lucky position. These days, its perfectly acceptable to ask for donations towards your honeymoon in place of a traditional present. If you’re already living together, the chances are you already have everything you need anyway and your guests would probably prefer to help you out with a holiday than buy you another waffle maker.
Thanks For Reading!
We hope you’ve enjoyed our money saving ideas for your wedding. If any of them have helped you save even a few pounds then we’re happy! Good luck with your upcoming nuptials from everyone here at Entertainment Nation!
