Wedding Money Saving Tips
My two high street dresses - total £105
Weddings are going to cost you money, there is no two ways about that. There is no such thing as a free wedding, even if you do the bare minimum legally with not a single frill or even a celebratory meal afterward, it costs to give legal notice and get your wedding certificate. And the more you add on to your day the more the cost adds up and even those who profess to have a ‘cheap’ wedding can easily spend a grand. A cheap wedding these days is a few thousand, with the average British wedding costing £31,974 you need a decent amount of cash behind you for your big day.
I haven’t actually added up what our wedding cost us but I have a figure in my head I imagine it’s close to and even that is more than I would have liked to have spend. However, we definitely saved a few bob and spent in the areas we were passionate about and below I am sharing my top tips for saving the pennies…
Have a local ceremony in a registry office - I had no idea you have to pay a registrar to come out to your wedding venue, presuming it was just one stand alone fee to get hitched so imagine my surprise when I realised it was going to cost us £400 to bring our registrar to the venue, and then the venue would charge an extra £200 to have the ceremony there on top of the party weekend. We’d already toyed with the idea of not having all the guests at the venue and when I saw the price my mind was made up. Sure registry offices aren’t always the most photogenic places and it sure didn’t have the wedding vibe when we were milling around in the corridors with people waiting to register births and deaths and talk about their council tax but it did cost us about £400 quid less than it would have to get married at our venue.
Don’t buy a fancy dress - Definitely a controversial one and I can see why some brides want to splash out on an expensive dress. I can see why people want a one off, want something nobody else has or heck, have one designed just for them but for me, justifying the price on a boutique wedding dress for one day was never in my price zone. I could not recommend buying a high street dress more from my experience. They are a fraction of the price, mine was easily 10% the cost of your average wedding dress and it was perfect. And chances are, you’ll never see another bride in your dress anyway so who’s to know!
Don’t kit out the wedding party - I mean sure, it can feel a little testy to ask people to be a part of your special day and then expect them to pay for their outfits, especially if you have a ‘vision’ in mind they need to stick to. For us, it was easy because we didn’t have a wedding party so there was no best man, maid of honour or bridesmaids to dress and our Dad’s just wore suits they owned as there was nobody to match. I bought my two nieces matching navy dresses from H&M for £9.99 each and got them tights, shoes and cardigans in Primark and they were probably dressed for under 30 quid between them. If you are having a wedding party but want to save some bucks then maybe work out a ‘theme’ with things they already own?
DIY whatever you can - I’ve written a whole blog post on my love of a DIY wedding but it does save money if you can do as much as you can yourself. This is of course within reason, sometimes it costs way more if you have to buy a million materials to start with but we definitely saved some money in doing things ourselves, like making our own favours, chopping our own logs for wooden centrepieces and having a homemade cake where we only had to pay ingredients.
Sell everything on at the end - It might mean you’ve forked out in the first place but you can always sell things at when it’s all over. We got a decent amount of stuff given to us for free from friends and Jos’ brother who’d got married the previous year so I paid that forward and gave lots of the vases, photo frames and the place card holders away for free but we also have a huge pile of things to sell when I get round to listing them.
Cut the cake yourself - Most venues will charge you per head to cut the cake. Yes you read me correctly, if you have 100 guests at your party you can expect to pay around £150 extra for the privilege of having the cake cut up. We bought 4 knives so there was no cross contamination and then my Mum cut the cakes for us and guests lined up to eat some faster than she could slice and it saved us money so was a no brainer. Sure it takes away from the day for someone who has to stand there chopping but if you have a willing relative or friend who can take over for you then you’d be mad not to keep that cash for something else.
Buy your own linen - Another expensive element of a wedding that I don’t think most guests give two hoots about; the table linen. You’re probably already paying per table and chair to seat everyone and then you have to add on £7+ and a quid per person for tablecloths and napkins? No thank you. Our venue had expertly priced their table cloths which we needed so we didn’t damage the tables underneath so we did hire those but instead of fancy linen napkins folded into the shape of a swan or something, I bought linen look napkins from Ebay and saved myself a fortune - after all, they only for people to wipe their mouths on and lots of venues will charge you for a laundry fee afterward.
Don’t shop high street rings - If you’ve been bought a ring from a high street jeweller, they probably have a matching wedding ring and a groom’s ring too and you’ll understandably want to match the set - but it can easily set you back a couple of grand. My engagement ring is a family ring from generations back so I knew I wanted an antique ring as nothing modern was going to match it. You also need to consider what metal your ring is too and that will determine cost in some way but I saved literal hundreds of pounds on our wedding rings but going to a local jeweller and getting old rings. My ring was £75 and Jos’ was about £100 with resizing too and the best bit of mine is how unusual and unique it is.
Make your own invitations - I mean sure, I had an advantage here being an illustrator but you really don’t need any design skills to make your own invitations. I am allll for small businesses, for handmade everything, for hiring illustrators to create the wedding stationery of your dreams (hi, please hire ME) but if you want to save some dollah it’s an expensive non essential part of your day you can definitely save on. There are plenty of free invitation templates at your fingertips with a quick Google where you just drop in your own details and if you have your own printer or can borrow someone else’s or even the one at work, the cost of some decent paper and an ink cartridge is considerably less than having your invitations designed and made for you. Or sack it off altogether and save on postage too and just make a website or email everything out.
Drive yourself or get family to drive you - Holy heck wedding cars are expensive and a pretty big waste of cash if you can avoid spending it. Most cars looking nice enough when they’re gleaming clean and have a ribbon on and forking out a fiver for some bows for your own car rather than a few hundred or thousands for a vehicle to make one journey in is much more cost effective. If you’re lucky enough to have family or friends with a really nice car (my uncle did offer me his range rover that has been used as the wedding car for all my cousins) then see if they’d be up for being your chauffeur or alternatively, do what we did and drive yourself in your pickup. Any car is a wedding car with a bow on.
Make your own cake - I have no doubts this is some people’s worst nightmares but for someone like me who’s Mum made cakes for a living (including her own wedding cake) there was never another option and tbh I think she’d have been furious at me if I’d asked anyone else. Like with everything else with the word wedding in front of it, wedding cakes can add hundreds to your day, most people over estimate how much they need and hardly any guests eat it anyway. We opted out of having a big tiered cake and instead my Mum made four of her most loved cakes - a victoria sponge, a carrot cake, chocolate and a big boozy fruit cake and we didn’t serve pudding to make sure everyone enjoyed it and we STILL had cake leftover the morning after for guests to takeaway. Between our cake stand, the boards and boxes, the knives to cut it and the ingredients we probably spent £100 tops and I’d be surprised if it even came to that much.
Do your own catering or have a takeaway - This one can be a bit hit or miss cost wise but it’s worth exploring. Lots of venues only have authorised caterers and they can be pricey per head so check that out before committing to a venue or lots of venues, like ours, will have a recommended caterer but will allow outside suppliers for an extra fee. In the end it made more sense and less stress for us to have the on site butchers do all our catering and it was a decision I did not regret, however, we did a lot of the additional catering ourselves and did at one point explore the option of getting takeaways in.
Do your own entertainment - I waxed lyrical about how much of a success doing our own playlist was in this blog post but it really did work so well and saved us a fortune. I totally respect DJs and bands and artists need to be hired and they’re worth their salt but it definitely saved us. We downloaded the Spotify free trial for a Premium package and downloaded the playlist to my iPad and hooked it up to the venue speakers by Bluetooth. Check what facilities your venue has and see if you can save money for entertainment.
Ask for help and favours - I was terrible at asking for help, more interested in keeping all control because I am terrible, but people want to help you. I had so many offers of help or favours and the more you take advantage of them the more likely you are to save a bit of dollah in the process. If there’s something you think you and your hens can have a bash at doing yourself rather than paying someone else to do then go for it. Got a mother in law who’s a dab hand with a needle - get her to do your dress alterations. A friend who’s a photographer? Not only will you feel completely relaxed and be supporting a pal, you never know what rates they churn out. Every little helps.
Ask for money for your wedding gifts - We didn’t ask for gifts at all and if you live together, a ‘traditional’ wedding gift list maybe isn’t all that appropriate to you so money is always a good option. Guests want to contribute something to your day and it may well amount to your honeymoon or at least paying off some of that final bill!
Think about what is really necessary to your day - My biggest piece of advice for saving some cash would be to think carefully about every purchase and how important it is to your day. Our priorities were making sure everyone could stay for the whole weekend and everyone was fed so our two biggest expenses by far were the venue which allowed for 40odd guests to stay there and 3 days worth of food from the caterers. Everything else to us was surplus and we saved a fortune on things that were less important to us like the music, outfits and pre wedding parties.