ALT-10 Best Ways to get Married on a Budget
You don't have to spend thousands and thousands of pounds (or dollars!) on your wedding day. Honestly. I know, it's the biggest day of your life and you want it to be special. Fairytale even. But you can have a fairytale wedding and spend less than a quarter of the 'average' - we did it. My wonderful husband and I got married in June last year, it was the most fantastic day of our lives, everyone said it was the best wedding they had been to in years and years. And yet it cost us less than 5000.
And what was our secret? Two things:
One, work out what's important to you both and spend the money there. To us, the ceremony where we said our vows and looked each other in the eyes was the most important part of the day. Yes it was wonderful that our friends and family were there to share it, but for us it was all about each other. So we spent money on having the beautiful bells ringing and a wonderful choir helping our family to sing along. We kept the drinks and the meal simple - but delicious. We're not big dancers, so we skipped the evening reception - and anyway - we wanted to get off on our honeymoon adventures...
Two, simple can be so much nicer and more memorable than over the top. We picked a beautiful church and so we didn't need any extra flowers. We asked the best men and ushers to wear their own suits and just bought them each a tie to co-ordinate. The bridesmaids got to wear pretty summer dresses that they could wear again and again. Instead of a big wedding cake, we bought a selection of mini cakes in all different colours and sizes from the supermarket and laid them out. Instead of traditional wedding favours, we placed small bowls of traditional sweets on the reception tables.
The biggest risk of all? We chose not to have a professional photographer. Photographers for weddings cost a lot of money, often more than 10% of the entire budget. Sometimes they are fantastic, take beautiful, amazing images and help the day along. Sometimes, and I'm sure you've been to weddings where this has happened, the photographer can take over proceedings and disapoint you with their photos and your too high expectations. Nowadays so many people have high quality digital cameras which can come up (with a bit of skill or luck!) with as good a photo as any professional! We asked specific members of our family to take a few specific pictures, just to make sure someone was taking a photo at every important moment. It worked fabulously and we have an elegant album full of gorgeous wedding photos to treasure for the rest of our lives. It cost us less than 100.
You see, the important thing about a wedding is the getting married part of it and sharing your life with someone else. Not the event, not the show, and certainly not the variety of the canapes, the size of your wedding cake or whether you arrived in a vintage rolls royce.
