Married on the cheap?

Jo_F

Got married nearly a year ago, simple registry office do. There was me and him, my son, my daughter and her fella, hubby's mum, and 6 close friends.

I bought a £40 evening gown, spent about £30 on a dress for my daughter, we did our own hair and makeup. Hubby bought a suit in the half price sale at Greenwoods. I did the flowers (two bouquets and 3 buttonholes). Son wore his prom suit, but did get new shoes.

We all piled into the pub afterwards for a meal (think the one that does 2 meals for a tenner lol), few drinks, choice of desserts and the bill for the food and drinks came to around £240.

Everyone had a great time and were saying for ages afterwards that it was the most relaxed and fun wedding they had been to.

It is supposed to be about the marriage and not the wedding.

vroombroom

We're getting married in October on a weekday. It's costing £1100 :money: the most expensive thing has been the registrar coming to our venue where will have a meal - almost £500! x

dottyvintage

See my earlier posts which tackle this subject nicely.
:-)

GwylimT

You can get married for £200 at a registry office.

TonyMMM

GwylimT wrote: »

You can get married for £200 at a registry office.

For about £125 actually ... at a registration or register office ( no such thing as a registry office ).

GwylimT

TonyMMM wrote: »

For about £125 actually ... at a registration or register office ( no such thing as a registry office ).

Must be different in Wales then.

dottyvintage

Can you give us an outline of what you are doing and for how many guests :-)

Evil_Olive

We got married on the cheap - we had 200 guests to both ceremony/reception and evening do and spent around £2000 (on EVERYTHING bar the honeymoon) but if we'd had less dosh we could have cut this down further without it looking cheap so I would say that you wanting to spend less than £2000 is doable.
Although you really shouldn't be thinking about what other people think, especially if they are supposed to be your friends, remember that just because it is cheap, doesn't mean it has to look cheap.......I was quite proud of doing it so cheaply and mentioned the amount we had spent to a few guests after the wedding - they were quite shocked and said that it hadn't seemed like a 'budget' wedding at all.
Admittedly we were helped by the fact that we are both creative people and this meant that we had plenty of talented friends to cadge favours from and were able to get away with a few 'unconventional' choices. But most people will have various friends and relatives who can do things that would normally have to be paid for and my experience was that people were falling over themselves to offer help.
The things we did that saved us the most money and may be worth thinking about were:

1) DIY it. Call in favours and ask for people to do things for the wedding rather than give you wedding gifts and DIY anything that you yourself, or willing friends/family are good at. Always ask around before deciding to pay a stranger for anything. Just make sure that no one person has more than one job to do on the actual day so that they can enjoy the wedding too.

2) Think outside the box - avoid anything that advertises itself as being specifically for 'weddings' and don't mention the W word when asking for prices - say it's for a 'family celebration'
It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of everyone elses wedding and you don't have to do things how you're told they should be done. Think about what you want, and then brainstorm a cheaper way of getting it (or something similar.) Do LOTS of research before committing yourself to any particular product or supplier.

3) 'Organise' it yourself - It's lovely to be able to pay just one company then forget about it and let someone else coordinate all the different parts but if you need to save cash you will need to put the time in and arrange things yourself. With that in mind, don't choose venues that tie you in to using their own catering/drinks/registrar/DJ etc. It's often cheaper to source all the different parts separately and you have more control over choice and quality.

4) You don't have to have EVERYTHING you see in the magazines - don't read them, don't believe them, they're full of re-gurgitated rubbish and manufacturer/supplier sponsored 'articles'.
Cut out anything that isn't completely necessary to you and don't have things just because they're 'cute' or 'trendy' (those white flip flops and baskets of toiletries in the loos come to mind )

5) The things you do have don't have to be the expensive versions - they only have to look good for one day and no one will notice - really

Here's some stuff that we did to save cash without compromising on quality that shows the above principles at work (in a lot of cases we ended up with a better result than the conventional way)
Hope some of them might give you ideas for your own do

CLOTHING
Our bridesmaids dresses came from china via ebay at £50 each and, if I hadn't had them made to order because I wanted a custom colour and a childs version, they would have only been £23 each. They fit fine, the fabric was fine and the style was lovely. They were even able to make one up for the 11 year old to match exactly so that she could have a 'grown up' dress. As a dressmaker, I did wince a bit at the quality of finish, but it was only really noticable on the inside and looked absolutely fine on the day and in the photos.
We bought very pretty jewelled shoes from an online indian shoe shop at £15 a pair.
My stepsister is a hairdresser - she did our hair as a wedding gift. We did our own make-up.

We didn't hire expensive suits for the men - we just bought smart matching shirts for them in the wedding colours which they wore with their own trousers etc - they look great in the photos.
The groom wore a smart white shirt and an ex-hire wedding waistcoat from ebay (£10) with his own trousers etc.

I'm a dressmaker, so made my own dress for a fraction of the cost of a bought one and it was much more individual and made from much more expensive fabric - I appreciate that not everyone could do this - but do you have a friend or family member who could as a wedding present? Depending on the chosen style and fabric, the cost of basic materials for a decent wedding dress could come to as little as £25. If not, there are plenty of suggestions from other posters above. Go for a white 'evening' or 'prom' dress rather than a 'wedding' dress and you'll save a fortune. A friend had hers professionally made by a dressmaker - it did cost £800 but both dress and lining were heavy 100% silk so I'm sure it could be done cheaper - man-made fabrics are very good these days and even expensive 'wedding dresses' aren't always real silk these days anyway.

VENUES & CEREMONY
The legal bit is loads more expensive when done as part of the big 'do' - venues with a wedding licence charge lots more to hire than those without and a registrar will charge a fortune to come to your venue - we held the main ceremony as a traditional handfasting in an unlicenced but pretty village hall with a tree-lined meadow out back which we hired for £150, we had a local pagan priest do it (he charged expenses only - about £30 for travel and props) but any friend with a clear speaking voice and confident manner could preside - you get to design your own ceremony that way too. Several of our guests told us it was the most moving wedding they'd ever been to.
We then 'legalised' it in a register office with just our parents present a couple of days later for £45 plus the £35 each notice fee.

We booked the upstairs bar of a local pub for the evening do for free (the upstairs bar was little-used and they made their money from the extra drinks sold)

FOOD & DRINK
a friend made a huge plain white-iced 4 tiered cake (ingredients cost around £30) and we decorated it ourselves with fake ivy wound round it - it looked surprisingly classy. For the topper, we laid a green man plaque flat on top (this meant something to us as it was the very first Christmas gift I ever bought my husband)

We chose a village hall that let us provide our own food and drink
We cut out the expensive sit down meal by having the ceremony late afternoon and providing a light cream tea buffet straight afterwards to keep people going till the evening buffet.
Our cream tea consisted of scones, jam, cream, eclairs, teabags, milk sugar etc from Iceland, tesco and asda (approx. £50 in total) - it was delicious and looked beautiful laid out on all the cake stands (hired for a couple of quid each) and doilies.
We paid a couple of my sisters friends (who weren't guests) £35 each to dress in white blouses/black skirts and lay out the cream tea buffet and serve the tea/fizz/pimms at the ceremony venue.
We used the Tesco own brand version of Pimms instead of the real thing and researched a Cava with good reviews at a fraction of the cost of Prosecco or champagne.
We limited the drinks at the ceremony venue to one pimms per person as a welcome drink and one glass of fizz for a toast plus as much tea/coffee as they wanted and saved the serious drinking for later in the pub when the guests were buying their own (They didn't mind this at all at local pub prices - a 'wedding' venue would have fleeced them).

We chose the pub partly because they let us provide our own buffet. A regiment of aunties and cousins made buffet food and transported and laid it out for the evening. An uncle who is a retired chef did us a fully decorated whole salmon in aspic as a centrepiece.

FLOWERS
We didn't bother with flower arrangements as decorations and just had the brides/bridesmaids bouquets and buttonholes. A friend who does flower arranging as a hobby made these with flowers from the local wholesalers.
We limited the number of buttonholes to groom, parents of the bride and groom, best men and ushers only

TRANSPORT
Friends/family who had interesting vehicles (a 1960s convertible and a souped up 1980s boy-racer 'muscle' car ) drove bride/groom about on the day instead of us hiring cars.
A friend with a 4x4 pickup truck type thing transported all the bits and bobs/cake etc between venues and one of the ushers with an MPV drove the bridesmaids.
We only arranged transport for the immediate wedding party, other guests made their own arrangements and gave each other lifts etc.

ENTERTAINMENT
A friend with a flute played throughout the ceremony.
Other musician friends provided the evening entertainment as a wedding present - a variety of bands and they allowed us to use their PA system to plug an mp3 player into for a 'disco' afterwards (a great plus with this was that we knew the music wouldn't be carp )

DECORATIONS
Having the ceremony late afternoon meant that we could decorate the venues ourselves in the morning so didn't have to pay more than one days hire charge - all the ladies did the village hall and the groom & ushers did the pub.

For the cream tea, we used the venues own tables/chairs dotted about tearoom style. As centrepieces on each table we designed labels to match all the other wedding stationary on the computer and printed them out at home to stick on old wine bottles. We bought gerberas to match the wedding colours in a local florist for £1 each and put them in the bottles - one on each table with a scatter of those 'table jewels'.
We bought a massive roll of white P.A.R.C. (that cheap fabric that's a bit papery) for £10 from ebay to make wall hangings and medieval style vertical banners for the village hall which an arty friend spraypainted with abstract leafy designs. We cut up what was left for the table cloths. We bought long lengths of fake ivy cheap from ebay and edged the cream tea buffet table with it and strung it everywhere.

An Art teacher friend made two beautiful large 3D green man plaques which we mounted on poles and used as the sides of an arch to mark the 'aisle'.

For the evening venue, we took the gerberas in bottles with us and put them on the tables with a scattering of sequins this time, and the pub provided tealights/holders for each table.
We chose the pub partly because it was 14th century and full of old beams so looked lovely with minimal decorating. We just strung more fake ivy and fairy lights along the beams (family/friends lent us all their christmas ones)

PHOTOGRAPHY
Lots of people are amateur photography hobbyists these days due to the ease and cheapness of digital photography. We found lots of our friends & family were and all offered to help. We chose one person to do all the formal photos as a wedding gift and we asked the rest to bring their equipment if they wanted and wander about 'roving reporter' style taking ad hoc photos of whatever they fancied. The resulting mix of styles and subject matter made for some amazing photos and is something we would never have got from a 'wedding' photographer

WEDDING STATIONARY
Made my own invitations, orders of service and other stationary out of beautifully textured papers bought cheap online with help from friends and my computer. We took a photo of the green man plaque we used on the cake and used it as the main motif on everything. This meant that everything was hand made, matched perfectly and ended up looking much posher than the bought version.
For the guest book, we bought a cheap artists sketch book, covered it with paper in the wedding colours and printed up a matching label for the front cover.

SUNDRIES
My sister made the card/gift postbox from a cardboard box covered in ribbons and pretty paper.

A friend scoured the local woods and made us a traditional hand made broom to jump over with a bent ash handle and broom plant bristles decorated with ribbons in the wedding colours.

Instead of fancy boxes for the cake people took home, we bought some old fashioned striped paper candy bags (ebay, £3 for 250) in an appropriate size and in a stripe colour that matched the wedding - each piece was popped into a plastic food bag first (asda, 75p for 100) to prevent grease coming through the paper bags. They looked really effective all lined up on a table near the exit and did instead of favours.
We did without table favours - as we didn't have a sit down meal - we just had small tea tables dotted about and people tended to mill so they weren't needed - most people leave them behind in my experience anyway.

HONEYMOON
A friend with a traditional stone cottage, halfway up a mountain on the posh side of Crete offered it, and the use of a car over there for our honeymoon as a wedding gift so we just needed to sort out airfare and spending money. Again, it was the sort of place we could never afford to stay in normally and the car meant we saw a lot more of Crete than had we been in a complex on the tourist side.

We honeymooned late in the season so air fare was cheaper and I was able to kit myself out with a good quality holiday wardrobe for around £50 by visiting a wealthy town and raiding the charity shops for the stuff all the rich people had been wearing that summer .

firesidemaid

Sounds Amazing EO!


I'm just watching 'How the Rich get Hitched' open-mouthed - It's appalling how much money is being spent

Blueyez

firesidemaid wrote: »

Sounds Amazing EO!


I'm just watching 'How the Rich get Hitched' open-mouthed - It's appalling how much money is being spent

I watched that. Totally should have went into the dress making business if people are willing to part with cash like that!:eek: Sparkly things!