When you think of weddings, you begin to conjure up an image of a blushing bride with a long white gown surrounded by candles, flowers and of course, a dashing groom. While the picture of a perfect wedding brings joy to all, the reality of weddings is a dollars and cents sink whole. Weddings cost money and are one of the biggest, most bustling businesses in the United States. You could spend a small or large fortune on your wedding from selecting flowers to purchasing the perfect dress.
Securing videographers and photographers, caterers, musicians and a variety of other vendors to perform services on your special day could set you back the cost of a down payment on a house. Save yourself and your new groom a little money and design your own wedding invitations. With the help of online catalogs or a visit to a craft store, you could save the cost of hiring a professional printer and still create a beautiful, memorable wedding invitation to send to your guests.
Planning a wedding is an exercise in spending money. Every vendor gets a check to provide a product or a service. First, the bride and groom select a location to hold their wedding reception. They have to secure a venue to hold the wedding ceremony which often entails a donation if it is a church or temple and a fee if it is at a hotel or public location. After selecting a photographer and a videographer, each vendor is offered a percentage of the total cost of the service to ensure their attendance on your wedding date.
Next, the bride and groom and other members of the wedding party and close family members need to select dresses and tuxedos to wear on the special day. Another expensive purchase involves selecting flowers to adorn the wedding venue and the reception hall as well as for the bride, bridesmaids and flower girls.
Since wedding planning is so expensive, you can work to ease the budget by doing some things yourself. Instead of hiring a wedding coordinator, do the planning and organizing yourself. If you don't feel like you have the time or ability to manage the wedding planning process, enlist a favorite family member like an aunt or cousin or recruit a close friend who isn't part of the wedding party to help with selections and to do items. Design your own wedding invitations and print them on your home computer to save costs at the expensive, professional printers.
Plan to address them yourself and save the added cost of hiring a calligrapher to address your envelopes. Instead of spending extra money on purchasing wedding favors and printed napkins and matchbooks, make a donation to your favorite charity or an organization that reflects your values and interests and share the donation information with your guests. If you are looking to cut costs, you could even recruit a family friend or talented relative to video tape your nuptials and reception or take photographs to save an enormous amount of wedding costs.
Having a classic, memorable wedding doesn't have to break the budget. There are some wedding expenses that you just can't avoid. Since most brides have to buy a wedding dress and pay for a venue for their wedding and reception, some costs are fixed. When possible, doing wedding projects yourself can save you gobs of money. When considering how to shave the budget, think about whether your guests will know you did the work or outsourced it to a professional.
While putting together flowers might be difficult, your guests may never know you worked to design your own wedding invitations and printed them yourself. Take the money you save on wedding expenditures and put that towards building a future with your new spouse.
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