How to save big money on planning your wedding
We have come to that point where everyone does while planning their wedding in Chicago [and elsewhere too] when you realize that what you originally forecast-ed for your budget was horribly wrong. The original goal we had for planning the wedding was to have a comfortable yet elegant wedding for less than $15,000. I thought that taking $10,000 off the $25,000 national average for the cost of a wedding would be challenging but possible. We aren’t fancy people, we don’t require a fairy tale wedding or something from a dream-book.
I was wrong. About the money part. We aren’t having anything close to a dream wedding and our projections have it the big 25K mark. This includes everything from the sample invitations to the cost of the all inclusive package at the reception place. The startling thing is that we got decent deals on a lot of things. We turned down a lot of reception halls because they had minimums too high that we could not meet. I bought a sample dress on clearance that actually fits and may not need many alterations. We got the engagement ring from Steve’s family and they were happy to pass on an important heirloom. We are borrowing my dads car for wedding transportation because it’s a really fancy Buick and it’s white. [and free] Yet we are still looking at 25K in the total column.
Where were the surprise costs? Well a couple of areas. First off, all the wedding vendors quote costs for things assuming you are going to spend $50,000 not $25,000. So, all the average prices you read about in magazines are less than the smallest cheapest packages most places have quoted. This especially is the case in Chicago.
The other thing that we found out was that all this running around to view halls and meet vendors takes a lot of time. Seriously. If you work full time like we both do and have the holidys to contend with and a full social calendar, you don’t have time to go meet with or screen more than a couple vendors in each category. With our Saturdays before the wedding limited now [only 12 left] we have to cut our losses and make some decisions to get things done.
Between a lack of time to meet every vendor to do tireless research and then realizing that we did want to have an event that looks nice and does make the family proud we ended compromising on price. A lot of compromise there sometimes. The things that we ended up spending more on than anticipated were:
1.The flowers, the standard places had no ideas whatsoever when we met with them and it ended up being 4x what my friends paid 7 years ago when we did find someone who can do spectacular flowers.
2. The reception dinner. Guests really want good food and enjoy that the most so we opted for a higher priced meal than we originally thought, plus the prices went up between when we reserved the room and when we will have the wedding.
3. The rehearsal dinner and Sunday brunch. Who knew this got to be such a big group of people and would cost $1,500 for each event.
4. Photographers and Videographers used to be around $1,000 each when all my friends got married. Not anymore. The photos cost $2,300 for a basic package and we turned away a lot over $3,000 and $4,000. Videography [which I think is actually more difficult to do] costs between $1,500 and $2,500 if you want an edited DVD to show people highlights who weren’t able to make it. Nobody watches the whole thing all the way through over and over again. Its the editing you really need, so you’re stuck paying more for it.
So, we’re pretty happy with things so far in the finding stuff we really likecategory but we have compromised a lot on price and time to get there. I really thought I could do this on a smaller budget but dealing with Chicago prices and needing to stay with high quality stuff, we ended up with a 50K wedding for 25K rather than a 25K wedding for 15K. Its a trade-off but since we have savings to cover it, we are going to run with it and hope we don’t have any more unexpected big budget expenses in the last 12 weeks.