Wedding budgets ? How much

mildredalien

We would never have expected our parents to pay for our wedding! We started planning for what we could afford, and as we started looking both sets of parents kindly offered (without any hints or prompting) to contribute amounts. We have taken that into account now but if they hadn't offered we would have scaled down our plans!

We are having around 60 people to our wedding, day and night, as we are sticking to close family and friends and it's likely to cost us about £13k. Not the cheapest way we could have done it, but it's what we wanted.

Lavendyr

Like others on here, when we were planning our wedding we set a budget that we could afford and worked within that budget. As it happened, my parents offered to pay half of the cost, but we would never have dreamed of asking them for anything towards it.

I think 125 is a lot, but then we had a relatively small wedding (60 for the day, 80 at the evening do) - and even then, we barely got the chance to speak to everyone. But I don't think it's excessive. What I do think is that you set your budget first and then work out how many people you can afford to invite - not the other way around.

Our wedding was about £10.5k all in. Areas where we managed to save money:

- Cake which a friend (ex-professional cake maker) kindly offered to make for us

- Car - we just had an airport taxi driver with an executive car, which he decked out with ribbons for us

- Bridesmaids dresses - I discussed this with them beforehand and they each agreed to contribute an amount towards their dresses, which again was very kind of them

- Flowers - our church flower lady did the most amazing job for us, we paid for specifics but she did so much more (also it was the week after Easter so she kept the Easter flowers going for us which just made the church look amazing)

- Transport to reception - we walked from the church! It was only about 5 minutes away.

- I did my own makeup - went to an Estee Lauder counter and got shown how to do it then bought the products myself.

- Ebay is great for things like bridal accessories - my tiara, veil and petticoat were all from Ebay.

- Favours - we asked our parents for help with this. We bought little wooden racks and mini jam jars (three jam jars per rack) and my mum made a jam and a marmalade and hubby's mum made honey (she is a beekeeper).

- Invites, RSVPs etc - Vistaprint does some very good offers if you can order well in advance, and the quality was good.

- We also used our RSVPs as place settings at the reception (as guests had to indicate their menu choices on their RSVPs). This did mean that we had to pay out for stamped addressed envelopes to include in the invitations, though, to make sure we got them back!

- Church - we are members of our church choir and so they sang for us for free. We also have a friend who is an organist and he played for us for free (he was a wedding guest though) and although we had paid for the bellringers, they very generously gave us our payment back as a wedding gift.

- Wedding band - we had a Ceilidh and because we only had a three-piece band (plus caller) it came in relatively cheap. The more people in your band, the more it costs.

- Wedding rings - we bought them online from Wedding Rings Direct - they are great quality and were much cheaper than buying from a bricks and mortar shop. They also offer a trial service with rings mocked up in silver, so you can try out different ring profiles and, if you want a shaped ring (as I did), different shapes to fit around the engagement ring.

tillyscot

I think it does sound a lot and it will be hard for them to cancel people off the guest list but less in day and more at night sounds better to me. I saved loads of money by using a wedding website instead of save the date cards, invitations and postage. I used Wedding Hand, its looks good,easy and FREE!