Planning My Own Budget Wedding - Twice Over! Part 1

Weddings have always captured our imagination as being romantic and so it’s hard to imagine that getting married may become a thing of the past, if you can believe what the latest news predictions are claiming.

Imagine, no more wedding gossip about the perfect wedding dress, elaborate celebrity weddings, outlandish wedding themes, or complaining about how bad was the wedding feast. What would we have left to talk about ladies?

I for one would hate to see weddings go out of fashion any time soon. You could say I’m a wedding fan, having had two weddings of my own, been married twice, and to two different husbands. The weddings were nearly exactly ten years apart and both very different. Here is how I planned my weddings on a small budget with some tips on how to save money.

First Wedding

My first wedding was when I was 23 and I didn’t know much about weddings except that my sister got married the year before me and I helped to organise it, so I knew what was involved.

My parents paid for most of my first wedding which allowed my fiance and I to save for a lovely tropical honeymoon. I decided on yellow and cream as my colour scheme and used doves and cherubs as the main elements.

Wedding Invitations

I am an artist so I had a lot of fun creating my own unique wedding invitations.  So I decided to make scrolls for the invitations and tubes to put the scrolls in. I used mottled yellow cardstock to cut out scroll shaped background sheets and then lightweight cream paper for the text which was pinned to the backing with a thin yellow ribbon bow and gold cherub stud. I made a tube out of the card stock to use to carry the invitation.

I tied a piece of thin yellow ribbon around each tube and then typed up name and address labels which I glued onto each tube.  As most of the guests were local I could hand deliver or get other people to deliver the invitations for me without having to pay for postage. For interstate guests, I folded the scrolls and put them in envelopes to be posted.

Wedding Ceremony
The wedding ceremony took place in a church and the reception was held in the hall next door. 

Catering

It was a self catered affair with just over 100 guests and several family and friends helped out with preparing and serving the food and beverages. My mother prepared the menu and then she and some of my aunts cooked the food either the day before or the morning of the wedding.

My father hired a keg with a tap for the beer and then organised for a friend to manage it on the day. We also had wine, punch and soft drink and champagne for the toasts and then we had tea and coffee after the wedding cake was cut and served.

My family also helped to decorate the hall and set up the tables and chairs. We used white tablecloths. Cream and yellow balloons were tied together and placed around the hall.

The catering equipment such as tables and chairs, tablecloths, crockery, cutlery and glassware were all hired from a catering company.

Wedding Cake

My aunt was a cake decorator so she offered to make and decorate the wedding cake. We just paid for the ingredients and the cake topper. The icing was white with tiny yellow and cream flowers as decoration.









Wedding Music
We had the minister organise one of the ladies from the church choir to play the wedding music during the ceremony which was included in the ceremony fee. We didn’t bother with flowers or decorations for the church as it was such a lovely church, it didn’t need any.

The reception music was put together from music collected from family and friends and included dinner music and then dance music for afterwards. 

Wedding Photography

My godfather was a photographer enthusiast and so he offered to do all the wedding photography and get the photos developed for us.

Wedding Flowers

My mother and I both had florist businesses so we made all the bouquets using silk flowers and arranged small bouquets of fresh flowers for the table centerpieces.
                                                                                                              


Wedding Transport

The wedding cars were borrowed from friends who had a couple of classic silver sedan cars.







I hope my personal wedding planning journey on my first wedding gives you some inspiration and tips on how to organise your own wedding on a budget. But wait, there's more to this story, my second wedding was very different to this one, to see how I planned my second wedding, read "Part 11".

Wedding Planning On A Small Budget

Image via Wikipedia

Wedding Planning On A Small Budget


Wedding planning on a small budget (eg: $5000 wedding budget) but not sure how such a small budget can get you the wedding of your dreams?

A diy wedding planner guide is a good place to start. It will take you through all the steps for planning a wedding.

A planning guide will show you how to organize and plan for your wedding like a professional.

The amazing wedding guide is a comprehensive set of tools that also comes with free wedding planning software.

Also included is a section on how to make your own wedding invitations  and some tips and secrets of planning a wedding, where you can save thousands of dollars off your wedding budget.

Try the Amazing Wedding Planning guide for yourself and see how you too can have an incredible wedding no matter how big or small your budget.

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Wedding Planning - First Steps

Image via WikipediaI couldn't believe it when I heard that the average wedding can cost anywhere between $20,000 and $30,000 according to different reports. I know my wedding didn't cost anywhere near that amount even though it was 17 years ago now.

Since that time a lot of my family and friends have had weddings where I've been asked to help out. I know that for most of the weddings I've been apart of, none have cost more than around $10,000 and they've all been a great success. I still hear comments about how beautiful my niece's magical wedding was and that was a few years ago now.

In many of the blogs I have been on recently, I've noticed that there's a lot of brides out there wanting to plan their wedding on a budget as low as $5000. With a lot of couples having mortgages to pay and living costs being so expensive, it can be a challenge to find the funds to pay for a wedding. Just because the average wedding is over $20,000 doesn't mean that you can't achieve the same wedding on a small budget.

The biggest question people have when it comes to planning their wedding on a small budget is:  "will I be able to have the wedding I really want?" Take it from me, the answer is definitely YES! I have seen where lots of couples with budgets as low as $5000 or less, have put a lot of careful effort into planning their wedding and have achieved the wedding of their dreams.

When the wedding budget is small, the most key element to success is in the planning process itself. Couples need to sit down and really focus on designing a wedding that is tightly focused on those elements that truly mean the most to them that they want to include in their wedding.

For many couples, planning a wedding is a first time event. There is so much information and advice to be found on the internet, often one of the biggest challenges is sorting out the good advice from the not very good advice.

I hope that this guide provides good advice on planning a wedding, saving money and tips on staying within the budget.

In order to plan a wedding, you're going to have to make a ton of decisions along the way. One of the first decisions is deciding on how much you want to spend on your wedding. For this you need to set a wedding budget.

For a typical wedding, the budget is divided into 5 main categories, such as:

Wedding Ceremony: venue, celebrant, wedding rings etc
Wedding Reception: venue, menu type, decorations, flowers, favors etc
Wedding Attire: wedding dress, bridesmaids dresses, groom's suit etc
Wedding Cake
Photography

Wedding Ceremony
In many weddings today, couples are opting to hold their wedding ceremony in a different location to the traditional church service. One popular option which I chose for my wedding, was holding the ceremony at the same venue as the wedding reception. There's a few benefits to choosing this option, including saving money, not having to hire wedding cars or pay the costs associated with a church service. Also, our guests didn't have the worry of travelling between the church and the reception and then having to find parking.

Wedding Reception
In a typical wedding the biggest expense is usually the wedding reception. It usually takes up between 40-50% of the budget depending on the type of reception you have in mind.

Wedding Attire
The cost of things like the all important wedding dress, can vary greatly, depending on whether you buy a designer gown, an off the rack dress, have the dress made, hire a gown or buy a second-hand gown off Ebay. Whatever the choice, there is a huge emotional investment that goes into choosing a wedding dress because every bride wants to look their best on the day. So setting a realistic budget will be very important, when it comes to factoring in how much you can afford to spend in this area.

Wedding Cake
The cake is one of the oldest symbols of a wedding and a very important must have item, for a lot of couples. These days there are a lot of different options available besides the traditional tiered cake.

Photography
Your wedding photos are a very important part of your wedding and will provide you with many years of memories. However, wedding photography can easily blow the budget out of the water if you don't budget carefully. While professional photographers offer a whole host of services and options, they can be very expensive. It's important for couples to shop around for the best deals or find other alternatives such as get a family or friend to do the job for you to cut down on costs.

The key to planning a wedding on a small budget is focusing on only those elements that have the most meaning to you and your wedding and then set your budget accordingly. The best way to do this is to get a wedding planning guide that will make the whole process, and covers everything aspect of your wedding right from the planning stage to the wedding day itself.

Here is a wedding planning guide that I think has a lot of great tools and resources and also offers to help you save money on every area of your budget. It's reasonably priced and also comes with a great
bonus too! If you're interested, check it out here....Amazing Wedding Planning

If you would like to see some reviews on a good wedding planning book or 2, then this is a great site, just Click Here!

Good luck with your wedding planning,

Regards

The Wedding Fairy