minimum wedding spend

emphatiC_hanK

Mumstheword wrote:

Our costs were:

Registry office licence
Rings


erm...
er.....

That was it!

You could have gone a step further and not bothered with the rings (you don't actually need them.)

:A emphatiC_hanK :A

achtunglady

We got married on a tight budget. I wore a red dress that i bought for £15 from a factory outlet store, wedding rings were £20 for mine £30 for OH, shoes were £40, had my hair done at the local hairdressing college £4, bouquet was £25 and a corsage for MIL was £10, sis in law made alice bands for her girls in red and white with small flowers on, bought some red netting for £5 and ribbon for £1 cut circles out of netting to make favours, bought sugared almonds from a pic n mix shop and put 3 in each, cake was from tesco, their plain white ones, decorated it with red icing and tied a red ribbon round them, hubby already had a navy suit so i bought him a navy tie with red lips on it, hired community centre (cant recall how much) food was homemade, everyone bought their own booze and we had a couple of bottles of champagne for the toast, friends took pictures, bro in law dj'd. We had three weeks to organise it and i'd say we did a pretty good job considering a budget of less than £1,000.
Next year is our tenth anniversary and we want to do something special, may even go along the same lines as our wedding, my wedding dress still fits me, well you can't really wear a merangue dress again can you lol

code-a-holic

Im very proud of the fact we got married for about £1,500 and we dont feel like we missed anything out!

We married in a hotel where the reception would be held (no cars needed!). Was also on a Tuesday (cheaper!) It was on Tenby sea front so perfect backdrop for photos!
They also did a buffet for 70. Total cost including honeymoon suite and bar room exclusively for us - £375
Registrar £125
We got married at 3pm (Didnt have to pay to entertain guests all day!)
My dress was the extravegance from a bridal store at £350. If i went for a sale item could have saved there!
Hubby's suit was a bargain - brand new on ebay for £10!
My son's page boy suit, New for £15 on ebay
All balloons and ribbons £10, ebay.
flowers. Mine and 3 bridesmaids and main table decoration, buttonholes £40 (artifical but very good and still have them in the attic to treasure!)
Made my own invites £8 in card, gold pen, stickers and paper roses, envelopes
Bridemaids dresses were different styles but same colour. One was second hand on ebay, a monsoon item for £5! another was £20 but couldnt find another suitable for third so hired for £45.
Waistcoat and cravat for hubby, hired for £15
Hairdresser - £40
Underwear, jewellery, guest book,little bits - £50
Mother in law got us the cake as a wedding pressie. 3 tier made to a photo i nicked from internet - £120.
Mum paid for dj as our pressie (£120 too i think)
My dad is a blacksmith so made a cake stand to my design - freebie as metal was already in shed!
A friend was a photogropher so he did them for free and gave us the CD and then printed them with truprint!

I think thats about it - cant remember if there was more than that.
Wsa a fab day and completely how we wanted it, WE could have spend more on it, but didnt see the need to, im a true bargain hunter and was so satisfied with the money we had saved.
Good luck with your wedding planning

cupid_s

i think the plan already is to get married possibly on a weekday. however it will be an out of season wedding which in itself is usually cheaper.

church fees at the church i'd like (the one where i got married) are cheaper than normal as its not a CofE church. And they decorate it for free as well.

but the bride is not that bothered about a church wedding to if it works out cheaper it'll just be a civil wedding (then no need for cars anyway)

the wedding and reception would be in birmingham/dudley area.
so if anyone knows of a photography student/graduate in that area it would be great to know. also if anyone knows of someone which does nice cars not too expensive that would be helpful just in case we need them.

me and hubby have decided to pay about £500 towards the wedding and my parents are giving 2k so they have to find very little really (lucky them!). Knowing her the budget will go way over anyway when she sees a dress for £900 she wants (when we were on holiday last she wanted to spend £500 on some jimmy choo wedding shoes that no one will ever see as they'd be under the dress)

Rachie_B

no offence but if shes " not bothered about a church wedding" is she / the groom even religious ????

if not then why would she even be considering the whole church wedding thing?

i know people do it for the " aisle, the big day " etc but to me its all wrong

you can get some lovely civil venues with aisles and you arent being hypocritical then by saying your vows infront of god when you arent religious !!

cupid_s

Rachie_B wrote:

no offence but if shes " not bothered about a church wedding" is she / the groom even religious ????

if not then why would she even be considering the whole church wedding thing?

i know people do it for the " aisle, the big day " etc but to me its all wrong

you can get some lovely civil venues with aisles and you arent being hypocritical then by saying your vows infront of god when you arent religious !!

i do agree that it's hypocritical to marry in front of a god you dont believe in but you dont have to be religious to believe in god and want him there/his blessing when you get married

we had this problem when we got married. i believe in god a lot though i dont have a religion and would never say i was at all religious. my husband doesn't think there is a god but i desperately wanted a church wedding so we had one in a unitarian church anyway as he wasn't bothered but to me it was really important.

unfortunately it's her choice and whatever she goes with will be fine. i know she does believe in god so it just depends if she feels better with a church wedding of not.

Joscar

We were married abroad on a beach. Had a fabulous time, felt like I was treated like a princess for 3 weeks (2 weeks away and 1 week after we returned before our celebration party)

We invited lots of family and friends, but as they would have to pay for the holiday themselves many declined. Sixteen people were at the wedding and about 85 at a party at our local pub the week after we came home. Although we were not married in a church, the service was religious based and was performed by a Reverend.

Wedding was a package provided by the hotel including flowers, button-holes, wedding cake, fiz, decorations, local Reverend for the service, legal paperwork, reception (which was 'English Afternoon Tea and cakes') and a wedding organiser to coordinate everything. All for £180.

My dress was £72 from Debenhams a white floor length evening dress (was £80 but I got a 10% discount for opening an account I have never used since + nectar points ) I could not justify an expensive dress in case it was damaged in transit.

Invites/Thank you cards we made ourselves. Instead of favours we sent copies of the wedding photos to those who could not go.

UK party was £1475 .... Caribbean buffet £8 per head, bar bill £270, Caribbean punch £80, Caribbean steel band £350, Flowers, balloons etc to decorate the room £95.

With shoes, groom's outfit, photos, ring. etc total price was £2000 + plus the price of a 2 week AI package holiday. Certainly much less stressful than the UK option as the wedding organiser sorted everything.

I would definitely recommend travelling with a wedding dress. The whole wedding party got a free upgrade to first class on both the flights. :j

slonik

If there are no suitable wedding dress shops (Debenhams, Monsoon, BHS) where she lives can you arrange a day out somewhere where there are such shops - like Birmingham? Or even somewhere smaller. Surely there will be a day between now and then when she will be in a bigger town and can go dress shopping? It's much, much cheaper than getting a dress made (at least in normal shops, I don't know about ebay), and you can get one for less than £100 or much less if it's the sales. You can make a day out of it, or combine with a visit to a friend/relative. Also, I suggest you do the invitations yourselves - just buy some card, find a picture on the internet (like some hearts or something) and print them out. You really don't need to be creative! Finally, it's a bit cheeky, but could you ask the BMs to pay for their own dresses (if they are ones they can wear again?)? And you don't need special shoes for BMs -especially if the dresses are long, any old evening shoes/sandals will be fine IMHO.

cupid_s

slonik wrote:

If there are no suitable wedding dress shops (Debenhams, Monsoon, BHS) where she lives can you arrange a day out somewhere where there are such shops - like Birmingham? Or even somewhere smaller. Surely there will be a day between now and then when she will be in a bigger town and can go dress shopping?

she lives in new zealand! so a day out to birmingham (which is indicentally where our parents live) is a bit outta the question. clothes shops in general are very expensive in NZ apparently and i noticed this when i visited. i wont even see her before the wedding and the reason i'm going to have to do the organising is cos she's not even in the country.

when she was my bridesmaid she looked at 'normal' shops in nz as the dress she got didn't matter to much as long as it was the right colour cos i only had the one bridesmaid. but they were ridiculously expensive and proper bridesmaid dresses even more so. in the end she found a professional dressmaker to make the bridesmaid one from material she bought herself and this still ended up costing £100.

slonik wrote:

Also, I suggest you do the invitations yourselves - just buy some card, find a picture on the internet (like some hearts or something) and print them out. You really don't need to be creative!

there wouldn't be too many people going and we found some lovely handmade ones for £1 each but we'd only need about 15 of them so it's not worth the bother by the time we've bought all the bits and pieces. remember my sis can't really do anything herself and i live in a different city and will be in the very final stages of my phd just before the wedding so wont have an awful lot of time to spend doing this sort of stuff. me and my mom will make the table decorations, favours and orders of service though

slonik wrote:

Finally, it's a bit cheeky, but could you ask the BMs to pay for their own dresses (if they are ones they can wear again?)? And you don't need special shoes for BMs -especially if the dresses are long, any old evening shoes/sandals will be fine IMHO.

I am one of the two bridesmaids and me and hubby have already said we'll give her £500 towards the wedding (even thoguh we're poor students) so i'm not paying for my dress as well! and if i'm giving her £500 i bloody well want some shoes out of it! (i bought her some expensive ones when she was my bridesmaid so it's only fair - i know i'm petty lol)

and i know some people do this but i think its disgusting to expect bridesmaids to pay for their own dresses, even shoes. if you can't afford to clothe the bridesmaid don't have one!

Drama_Queen

We did our wedding for less than 3k. I bought stuff in the sales and from eBay, such as wedding album, bridesmaids outfits/shoes and hair ornaments (how many bridesmaids do you have and what colours?!). Hubby wore his new suit (bought for Xmas do) - only hired a waistcoat for £6.00 - looked just as lovely as any hired suit, bought him new shoes in the sales - or factory outlet stores have good mark-downs. A very talented friend of the family did beautiful things with silk flowers - small bouquet for me and corsages for the girls to put on their dolly bags. I made my own invitations, table cards, place cards and favours - even learnt how to do calligraphy to make it look really good! Holiday was an all inclusive in Spain for less than £600 - we figured we could do the long-haul one for first anniversary - we hired a limo to take us and the bridesmaids to the venue and on to reception for only £150 - the food was great and we had a sit-down 2-course meal with 2 bottles of wine on each table and 8 bottles of bubbly on arrival for less than £700 for 50 people, not to mention the DJ also included for the evening - this inculded room hire too - private toilet/bar...then a friend of my daughter's did the evening buffet for about £200 - cost price coz we were family........oh, and the same lady who did the flowers, also went in and decorated all the tables with helium balloons and table confetti....if I can help further please email me: kirkytres@aol.com