money freak out

Hollymc09 · January 2011

Hi everyone1 fairly new to the boards

Anyway just needed to vent some and hoping people have some suggestions....

The wedding is mainly being paid for by my parents and the me and my FH. His parents really cant afford to give us anything which is really upsetting but understandable. In turn now FH and I are finding we are having to pay for the following:

Limo/transportation (for ourselves and our 24ppl bridal party)
Flowers
Favors
Invitations
Photography
Honeymoon
Rehearsal Dinner
Bridal party gifts

(I feel like Im forgetting something MAJOR ugh)

I am mainly having a HUGE freakout about the fact that after paying for transportation and photography we will have $11000 left for everything else. I know it may seem like enough for people but with our HUGE bridal party Im worried with how much flowers will cost us and how much a rehearsal dinner will run us. I thought I had budgeted enough so FH and I could have the honeymoon of our dreams but now Im panicking!!! Anyone have an good but cheaper vendor recommendations? Or any tips on how to save more money?

thanks

ButtonsPepper · January 2011

Don't be too picky with flowers. Give a budget and have them stay in that budget by letting them pick the type of flowers. For a RD, find a place that's less PP then others. Have just wine/beer instead of liquor to cut costs on PP, you are having a full open bar for the wedding, no need to for the RD as well. You can DIY your invites by getting printable stuff at the store, or going on Etsy.com and finding inexpensive invites by someone making them for you.

As far as a Honeymoon, what do you have your dreams set on? Figure out what that price will be, and then figure out how much left you are going to have for everything else. If after photography you have 11k, you are FINE. You can go on a really nice luxury honeymoon for 5k, leaving 6 for the few other things you were saying.

For favors, you don't have to do one, no one notices when you don't. If you do, DIY them to be inexpensive. Get like a bag of MM's and put them in little pouches. You can print out your name and date on a tag and hole punch them, tie it with ribbon and you have a great favor if you must do them.

For bridal party gifts, just budget out what you have left. The average I've seen are about 50-100 Per person, we were around that range.

G/L!!

LaRositaMonita · January 2011

If it helps, many of the things you have to pay for are places where I found it easy to cut costs. DH and I aid for our entire wedding ourselves. To be honest, some etiquette hounds will not agree with me, but favrs are way overrated. DH and I always wind up forgetting or tossing our favors from weddings, so instead we made a charitable donation in an amount that we found appropriate to our budget and had cards on each table indicating that we had done this in lieu of traditional favors. Since we picked a charity in line with our personalities/interests (Corgi rescue), we felt great about doing it and knew our money was being used wisely.

You can save money on flowers by asking a florist about ways to do non-floral centerpieces or keeping things simple. I will recommend my florist, Leslie from Whimsical Welcomes...she was very good at helping us work within the tiny flower budget I gave her. This was another place where I just kept the budget small because I didn't particularly care about having huge foral centerpieces or tons of orchids and calla lillies everywhere. I agree with BP on letting your florist suggest flowers...Leslie used a lot of in-season stuff I had neither heard of nor would have thought of myself and it really kept costs down, as well as looked unique.

Invitations can be DIYed if you are so inclined, made with the (very nice)kits available from Michaels or Target, or gotten inexpensively at a number of places. I would definitely recommend - believe it or not - the stuff Costco has to offer. Their invites are gorgeous! They partner with an outside company and the prices are awesome. Invitations were my favorite place to cut costs...as I have told numerous knotties since my own wedding, THEY ARE PIECES OF PAPER THAT EVERYONE THROWS AWAY

If you use a travel agent to book your honeymoon, they may help you work out an installment plan so that everything is paid off bit by bit before you leave. Our TA did this for the cruise we took and it helped immensely.

As for the rest...the key will be to pay things off a little at a time whenever you can. I am sometimes still in awe of the fact that as much as DH and I freaked out about the cost of our wedding we were able to pay for the whole thing, soup to nuts, out of pocket and go into zero debt of any kind. As long as you are deiligent and keep track of expenses and pay as you go, you will be OK.

Hollymc09 · January 2011

thanks so much ladies!!!!!! I appreciate your suggestions. I worry all the time about money and FH never does! haha I guess its just something I need to learn to just "breath" about

thanks for everything!

ysl1983 · January 2011

I think $11000 for everything sounds very doable.

DIY Invitations: I'm estimating mine to cost $500 (making 200 invites) and some knotties even think that I'm over estimating so this might actually cost you less

Photography: Are you getting someone really expensive? Maybe you can downgrade to someone else? Alot of the ladies here have some great recommendations

Favors: I agree with everyone else about not having it. All but one of the several weddings i've been to the past few years didn't give any favors and it was fine. A few friends did a candy bar or a popcorn bar which from I hear didn't cost them too much (Less than $500 I think?)

Flowers: My budget for this is $1000 because I'm doing mainly non-floral centerpieces (candelabras). There are some gorgeous non floral centerpiece inspirations out there

Bridal Party gifts: Maybe you can pay for their dresses and have that be part of their gifts? I was a bridesmaid for my friend and she found our dresses at Jcrew for like $40 on sale and they were gorgeous. Best part is they are rewearable.

Honeymoon: Are you by any chance having your wedding in a hotel? Or have a room block at a hotel? You can earn rewards points if you do and use that for your honeymoon. That's what we're doing. I should accumulate enough Marriott points to have our honeymoon at the Marriott property in Maldives or Hawaii

so all we have to pay for is airfare and food/excursions while we're there.

I say your two big ticket items are Limo/Transportation and Rehearsal Dinner since you have such a big party. I would estimate Limo/Transportation at $1300 and RD at $2500k

hmm soo let's see:

Limo/transportation: $1300 (based on what I'm paying for a trolley)
Flowers $1000
Favors $500
Invitations $500
Photography $2700 (base on what i'm paying)
Honeymoon $3000
Rehearsal Dinner $2500 (approx 50 people at $35each plus tax and tip)
Bridal party gifts $2400 (Something for $100 each which is pretty generous)

Total : $13900 but really only $9900 if you subtract Transpo and Photography.

Good luck with planning!

I'm sure I'm overestimating some of these things since my wedding hasn't actually happened. I"ll let the married ladies confirm if these are accurate or not

bballgirl8789 · January 2011

My FI and I are also paying for a huge portion of the wedding ourselves. Like someone said above, you don't really need to do favors. Some people won't even notice, usually people forget to take them home with them anyway. We aren't doing them.

Transportation- I come from a large family, so we have a 15 passenger van. We are going to use that for us and our bridal party. We decided not to do a limo to cut costs and since my parents had their van that we can use. Do you have any friends with large vehicles that you could borrow or something?

Flowers- We are doing silk flowers, we are fortunate to know someone from my church that likes to do flowers for weddings as a hobby. So we are paying her to make the arrangements. Silk flowers are nice, because you don't have to worry about them wilting, turning brown, etc. They can be done ahead of time, so one less thing to do last minute. I know a lot brides like to preserve their bouquet, now you don't have to worry about that so silk flowers are an option.

Photography- We actually just switched photographers. Our last one, honestly I don't know what I was thinking when I booked them. We are now going with Photography by Leah. Since I am OOT and planning our wedding (I am a college senior), other knottie that used Leah let me look at her wedding album. Anyways her work is fabulous, just talking to her on the phone, she was very professional, sweet and laid-back. Her prices are good as well. We are getting 2 photographers for 8 hrs, full editing of pictures and a cd with the rights for $2,000, which is a really good deal in my opinion since we are getting 2 photographers.

Invitations- I got my invites through David's Bridal. I looked at their invites that were under $100 since we're on a budget. We ended up choosing their "True Love" invites, which worked out really well since our theme is roses.

Rehearsal Dinner- My parents are covering that, but we aren't doing anything too fancy. We are going to be having a lot of people so we decided to do a home-cooked meal at our church. Most people love home-cooking. My mom, sister and other family members are going to be doing the cooking. My mom is doing:
hot roast beef with rolls and chicken salad with rolls, macaroni salad, fruit and casear salads. she's also doing some appetizers and then some dessert.

Bridal Party Gifts- FI is taking care of the men, but I just waited for a really good sale and got my girls nice pearl necklace and earring sets. They can wear them on the wedding day if they'd like and then can use it for future purposes.

Good luck with everything, I am sure it will all work out

[Deleted User] · January 2011

24 person BP! Good god! I would put the transport at the bottom of my list, ours is. You can just transport yourselves in a nice car and let them get there themselves/ arrange people to drive or rent a van etc. My personal opinion is to spend the money else where, but I know people disagree.

I got my invites from wedding paper divas, they were having a sale and the we got a discount at ruelala. I was going to make them, but I bought the wrong paper and I live in London and didn't have the time to make a correction.

Skip favors

Did you ask the BP already? If not I could consider not asking 24 people. That is flowers for 24 people, gifts for 24 people, etc, etc.

RD- have pizza or a BBQ at someone house.

We are going on our MH in Aug after our May wedding, this is due to me being a teacher more then money. However it allows you to recover a bit and see how much money you receive as gifts etc.

The major things you are forgetting are a venue, food, booze, DJ, someone and a place to marry you. This is going to be the bulk of your cost!

Plus attire you forgot that as well.

Shop sample sales and Sabrina Ann for your attire, look at sales for BP gifts, decor etc, Ruelala, all other online sites. ALWAYS look for discount codes/ coupons before you buy anything, this is true in general for me.

Look for frugal blogs.

Decide what is most important to you and your FI for your wedding.

nicole8586 · January 2011

First and foremost, did you already ask all 24? I had a 28 person bridal party and defiantly could of made some cuts if I didn't ask so soon in the planning process.

Favors - No need.

Honeymoon - Our HM was added on to our shower invitation registry list. We paid the initial deposit of I think $500 then the rest was paid in full by our guest. I seriously wanted to cry when our travel agent told us. I know some people think this is not appropriate but we could have paid for our HM if it was not paid for us.

Rehearsal Dinner - House party.

If you want to PM me I will tell you what we spent for the following.
Invitations
Limo/transportation (for ourselves and our 24ppl bridal party) -
Flowers
Bridal party gifts

happywithhim715 · January 2011

Limo/transportation (for ourselves and our 24ppl bridal party)
Flowers
Favors
Invitations
Photography
Honeymoon
Rehearsal Dinner
Bridal party gifts

For the transportation, we had a 25 people including us and then 4 of our parents on our trolley. We rent a 30 passenger trolley from Ceschape in Philadelphia. It was $1295 (I believe). They were great and there was plenty of room.... we even had our overnight bags for 29 poeple on the trolley too!

Flowers- figure out a budget and stick to it!! I wanted to spend $1000. But like I said we needed flowers for myself, my DH, 10 BMs, 1 FG, 10 GMs, 2 RB, 3 grandparents and the blessing for Mary, as well as two church arrangements. We told her $1000 and our florist was able to get us to $1068 which was close enough and we were happy.

Favors- We did a candy buffet which was about $300 with the candy and take out containers.... It was a hit, we had NO candy left over... Everyone loved it.. (we had 200 people at our wedding)

Invitations- I DIYed mine and spent with postage 1.21 an invitation... we sent out about 120.... So a little under $150! And we had pocketfolds too...

Did you say $11,000 after photography? Or you still need a photographer?

Honeymoon- Do an all inclusive in the Caribbean or Mexico. You could easily go for a week to an all inclusive for about $3000.....for flight and trip for 2!

Rehersal Dinner- We had it at a Italian BYOB... We worked out a deal with the place, had a buffet which was for $17.95 a person.. and brought our own beer and wine... It was MUCH cheaper than paying per drink..

Bridal Party Gifts- Stay away from the "wedding sites".... They are the expensive ones.. I got my girls: a tote bag, a bridesmaid tee shirt, flip flops, a picture frame, a pashmina, necklace and earrings for day of and spent $50 a girl... My DH went to personalization mall.com and got his GM a embriodered tote bag and a bottle of their favorite liquor and spent $50...

Any questions PM me!

money freak out

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