I will only have two bridesmaids.  When it came down to choosing my wedding party, I had a dangerous problem: too many close friends.  Sure, I could add more people to my wedding party, but suddenly there would be no one left sitting in the seats during the ceremony.  In addition, most of my wedding guests will be traveling across the country to come to our wedding.  It seemed cruel and unusual punishment to laden someone with all that extra debt.

As I am only having two bridesmaids, I decided to let them choose their own dress.  Yes, I partook in the shopping trips.  And yes, I did voice my opinion as to what would look good and what wouldn’t.  But, at the end of the day, both girls got dresses that they will wear again and for a really great price!  We were lucky enough to find two dresses on sale that didn’t look heinous.

I think letting your bridesmaid’s pick their own dresses is a great way to find a dress that is in their budgets and fits their bodies.  Happy bridesmaids make a happy bride.

If you are early enough in your planning process, this post may actually help you!  Morning weddings are a great way to save on wedding costs and make your day less stressful.

First, there is less demand or competition for venues and vendors, so you should be able to negotiate for a better price.  Just think, how many DJs have morning gigs?  No, not too many!

Second, breakfast foods are less expensive.  Bless the incredible, edible egg because your caterer can give you great deals on brunch.

Third, your guests will consume significantly less alcohol, so your bar budget will shrivel.  Even the heaviest drinkers can’t drink THAT much before noon.  Well, they could but it’s even less wedding appropriate to be drunk at a daytime reception.

And finally, your wedding reception will be shorter, so your reservation costs will be less compared to those of an all-night affair.  There is only so much dancing people will do at 1:00 in the afternoon.

Mr. soon-to-be-Heather and I are getting married at 6:00 in the evening.  That’s a long time to have to wait to get married!  You will probably spring out of bed early on your wedding day.  Why not get the festivities started early as well?  Like I said, save money and save stress!

Let’s face it- dry weddings are boring, and cash bars are tacky.  Yes, alcohol is expensive, but there are ways to provide drinks without breaking the bank.

First and foremost, anytime you can provide your own liquor you will save a fortune.  Suck it up, drive to your local liquor store and buy till your heart’s content.  Some liquor stores will even let you return un-opened bottles.  Check with your venue and then shop for the best deals.  Here is a an article suggesting how much alcohol you should buy.

Then, if you do have to purchase alcohol through your venue there are two options to cut down on your expenses.  You can limit your bar to beer and wine or you can provide one or two specialty cocktails.  Guests just won’t be able to drink as much beer, wine, or fru-fru cocktails.  And, not to be mean, but limiting your guests options will slow down how many drinks your guests take in.  Well, that would work with our guests.  Consider your audience, Mr. soon-to-be-Heather and I have explicitly told our bartender no shots because that is the expensive drinks our friends love to take in.

I went to a friend’s wedding this weekend and she had a really great guest book.  She and her fiance made a photo book/guest book out of their engagement photos which lead me to do some research…

Apparently, you can easily and inexpensively get a really nice book of your photos online (check out Shutterfly or MyPublisher for two examples).  What a great present idea for parents!

Wedding dresses, wedding decorations, and wedding flowers can all be very expensive but the heartbreak is that most wedding items will only be used on your actual wedding day.  There are a lot of opportunities out there to share, borrow, or purchase already used wedding items beyond using the family wedding dress.

I was recently contemplating place cards and whether I wanted folded stand alone place cards or if I wanted single flat cards that would need a place card holder.  My first thought was to just google “place card holders”, well actually my very first thought was to google “black river rock place card holders” but those don’t exist.  I didn’t like the prices of the other place card holders which I found, so I then jumped over to the classified section of Weddingbee.  No one on Weddingbee was selling what I wanted, so I hit Ebay and then finally Craigslist.  While I didn’t necessarily find exactly what I was looking for, I know that new items will be posted regularly and the good stuff can get picked up really quickly.

Another option is to talk to your venue.  Your church, hotel, or catering company probably have event items that they would happily let you use.  Or, they can put you in touch with other people hosting events that might be willing to share or sell you decorations or flowers.

After my quest for place card holders, I’m excited and re-rejuvenated to purchase used wedding items.  No one will know that they were used before AND they will cost considerably less money.  Good  luck with your searching!

I was reading an article with wedding savings tips. It wasn’t a very exciting article, so I’m not even going to bother sending you to it (remember… that’s my job… filter out all the useless wedding advice and just give you the good stuff!), but there was one quote I just had to share. In the article, one of the brides being interview says this:

“Pick three to five things and do those things very well. That was the best advice anyone ever gave me.”

I don’t know about “best wedding advice possible” status, but the more I think about this little comment, the more I really like it. At the end of the day, no one is really going to remember your wedding for all the little details. They’ll probably just blur together in one big memory from all sorts of weddings past. Heck, even as a wedding junkie, when I look back on any one specific wedding, I see a big blur of an image and can rarely pick out one specific detail.

However, in a few cases, I think back on weddings I’ve attended and remember one or two precise details that were incredible. For example, my roommate from sophomore year had the most incredible lobster bisque I’ve ever tasted. It was to die for. In fact, it was so great that every time I’m in South Jersey, I still go by that restaurant where she had the reception and order it. It’s incredible.

In another example, I’ll absolutely never forget the gardens where my cousin got married. You’ve never seen so many beautiful flowers everywhere. If a little bird landed on my outstretched finger and started singing to me, I would have been 100% positive I was in a Disney movie. As of right now, I’m only 98% positive.

So when you think about your wedding priorities and where you need to best budget your limited monetary resources, consider spending more money on the things that people are going to absolutely remember. Just off the cuff, I’m thinking things like food, venue, and music. No one is going to remember if your open bar served Grey Goose instead of Smirnoff, but they’ll remember if they ate the most deliciously tender lamp chops instead of a lukewarm chicken breast. No one is going to remember if you get married in a hotel ballroom in the Ritz instead of the Marriott (a hotel ballroom is a hotel ballroom… besides, it’s all about the decorations!), but they’ll remember if you got married in a luxurious private mansion instead of a hotel ballroom. And no one is going to remember if your DJ played the Electric Slide instead of the YMCA, but they’ll remember if the best 80’s cover band in the city rocked out the wedding reception for four straight hours.

The point is, spend money where it counts, and do those things really well. The rest is just small stuff. Appetizers. Flowers. Lights. They’re all important, but they’re not necessarily memorable. So if you have to be concious of your budget, think about how you best spend where it counts most.

Our biggest wedding expense is turning out to be food and beverage.  As Tennessean.com explains, this bride cut these expenses my having her wedding at White Castle, take a look here.

If you’re getting married, then you have probably heard about Etsy, and you really do not need to read this post.  If you have not heard about Etsy, then please go check it out- it’s a “handmade” marketplace.  I don’t know about you, but to me, marketplace is one of those words which always excites me…

Through Etsy you can search and check out thousands of designers/creators, read feedback from previous customers, and request samples.  I probably ordered fifteen different invitation samples and drove Mr. soon-to-be-Heather crazy.  I did have to pay for said invitation samples, but it’s normally the cost of just one invitation.  Everyone I reached out to was very friendly but not intrusive, and they all seemed very open to customizations.

In the end, I ordered my invitations from Green Been Designs.  Jenn has been fabulous, but unfortunately for you, she’s now on maternity leave.  Not only are they perfect for our event, but they were also less expensive then any of the major online invitation boutiques, and much less expensive then any local designers that I spoke to.

Yes, printing your own invitations is the least expensive option, but using Etsy will increase your wedding savings!

Yes, I know that you know that less people means less money.  And believe me, I understand that you want everyone you know to come to your wedding.  Or, that you have tried to come up with a smaller guest list, but the must haves just keep adding up.

Well, most will estimate that 85% of all invited guests will attend.  However, out of town guests or elderly guests can drive down your retention rate to as low as 45%.  What that means to me, is you really have no way to tell how many people will come to your wedding.

To make our invite list, my fiance and I grouped our guest list into three tiers: “will come”, “might come”, and “probably won’t come”.   We hope that even if people switch tiers, it will all balance out in the end.  But because this is a wedding savings blog…  here are some of my tips to cut your guest list before you make tiers (in no particular order):

1. Don’t invite anyone that you don’t consider a great friend. Our wedding location is not local for most guest, so when inviting people, I always ask myself, would I fly somewhere for their wedding?  It doesn’t matter if they invited me to their wedding, or if we used to be really close.  I figure that they would feel annoyed to have to come anyway.  I’ve happily been working on a separate list of announcements to send out the day after the wedding.

2. Don’t invite anyone that you haven’t met before. This might sound strange but this is for the collective “we”.  My fiance and I have been together long enough that we should have met anyone “important” in either of our lives.  If we or you haven’t taken the initiative to see us in the past few years, I don’t see why you are “important” enough to come to our wedding.  Again, very happily adding this group to the above mentioned announcement list.

3.  No “and guests” invites. If you have not heard about a significant other, then they don’t need to be invited to the wedding.  I sometimes wonder if an “and guest” invite is almost a challenge for singles to find a date.  Certainly you can try to be flexible with people and they come back and ask if they can bring a date.  A kind response would be: “we don’t have a lot of room in our budget for guests, but let me get back to you when all of rsvp’s come back, if we get enough declines we would be happy for you to bring a guest.”

4. No coworkers or children. If you are really close with some of your coworkers, or if you are close with some little one’s, and your day would not be the same without them then these would not be a good cuts for you.  These two blanket policies are great to eliminate numbers from your guest list and not hurt feelings.  As in “I’m sorry we really want an adult affair” or “We’re having a really small family wedding”.

5. Don’t send out save-the dates to everyone. This might sound a little fishy, but unless someone is family or a timeless friend, they might fall out of favor.  Waiting until closer to the wedding to commit to invite recent friends, local friends, coworkers, or friends of friends.  The decision may be easier then you think in a few months!

Good luck choosing who will be invited to share your special day!  Your wedding guests should all be people you love and who should be there to witness your happy day!  But if worse comes to worse, they should be people that you want to spend money on, and if not, cutting them from the guest list will increase your wedding savings!

I keep reading about unique, small details to add character to our wedding.  You know, small things that won’t cost a lot but will make the day more special, more memorable?  I came across this posting which parallels something I have been contemplating every morning for the last week: should I wear perfume on our wedding day?

Every morning this week, when I have spritzed on my favorite, honey-purchased perfume, I’ve considered whether or not I want to spray perfume anywhere near my beautiful, bridal gown.  Honestly, I haven’t decided yet…  but, if you think this is a great idea, I would recommend you check out Philosophy’s Amazing Grace.  It’s what I wear every day, and it’s a beautiful, light, clean scent.