Anyone taking advantage of the pandemic?

Girl...I was super bummed at first, but now we have had 1 ceremony and will have 2 more.

We chose different venues for the 2 upcoming ceremonies, which each are better IMO. We have more time to save but yet hire the same professionals we hired originally so they can still do work for us and get paid (helping them and their businesses in the long run) so win-win! Plus how many dresses??? LOL 😂😂😂😂

We had to cut down on our guest list, so that decreased our catering costs..so we had extra funds to buy masks/sanitizer/gloves so no additional costs for us there. Speaking of catering, the co-owner of our catering company is also the co-owner of the shop FH manages. FH and his boss thought our catering was all set, but in all the COVID insanity (the catering company pivoted and did some awesome things to keep viable during the lockdown, but our paperwork got lost in the pivot), things were not done properly. This gave us a chance to rethink our bar and bartender options with our new guest count in mind.

We are getting married on Halloween, and I had this image of a Halloween Candy and Popcorn bar for the cocktail hour. Instead we are saving money by making "goody" bags instead to put at each seat. Each bag will have a mask and hand sanitizer, but also candy and pre packaged snacks. The snack bar was going to run me around $400 with our original guest count. Between the reduction in guests and moving to prepackaged (and my sister gifting us prewrapped themed cookies) we are looking at less than $100 including the actual goody bags themselves (not including the COVID necessities, but those are covered in the savings above).

It’s so true! 😂😉

But please, no more dresses 😂

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I'm right there with you!! I also believe that our weddings will be better than we originally imagined. When I am working on my "second job," I love to tell my fiance that I'm working for him. He just rolls his eyes and says "no, you're your own boss." And you're right, we can always plan a trip to New Orleans or renew our vows there . . . hmmm!!

The decisions we had to make because of the current circumstances became the rainbow after the storm. Thank you for this post. It was much needed!

Actually yes!! Even though my FH was furloughed, he made a lot of $ on unemployment for the little while they were giving out a lot, and myself being an essential worker have saved a ton in hazard pay and two pay raises my job has given out within the last 4 months. So because of this, we are able to afford a string quartet for our ceremony and mocktail hour, which i REALLY wanted (violin player here!) Thankfully we were already planning on a small wedding, so we didn't have to cut our guest list too much. Other than that I think everything is pretty similar to how we had planned it, with the obvious exception of getting masks and having hand sanitizer as favors lol! We are 86 days away and it's finally starting to feel real to my FH who hasn't done a ton of planning lmao! What can I say, he would be happy getting married in pjs in our kitchen, he just wants to be married to me...

This is SO CUTE! If I wasn't so set on having a theme that could match our decor with pictures that we could have up year round I would have totally done something like this! My FH LOVES Halloween and would have absolutely died to have this theme lol!!

Yes! Having a smaller ceremony/reception/bachelorette/bachelor events are great for us because we're super introverted and will help save money! In addition since there's less planning, we've been able to focus on spending time with our families, being in community with peers at church, and doing pre-marital counseling/homework/reading.

Nice idea and a great substitute. That's thinking outside the box

Aww thank you! I am a warehouse worker for a major grocery chain and it's been crazy to say the least haha! Honestly I am loving the masks, it hides my resting you-know-what face and people have stopped asking me if I'm upset all the time LMAO! Not to mention the adorable fabrics I've used for making them! Yeah I am actually kinda excited, I took my scraps from alterations and made a matching mask and it turned out great!! Plus we got these adorable masks for our guests from Etsy that say "Quarantined for Life" with our names and date!