Tips and Tricks for staying within or under your budget!

Prioritize what you most want and either skip the stuff you dont care about or use a less expensive vendor for it. Hire students, shop thrift stores and garage sales for things that you can repurpose to decorate - allow friends and family who are talented to gift their services for things lower on your priority list.

Hi Michelle,

Here are a few tips for staying within budget. Cut the guest list and make it small and quaint. The larger the list, the more you have to spend per plate for catering and we all know that the food is one of the most expensive parts to a wedding Lol. Another tip is maybe look at getting a 1 or 2 tiered cake. Sounds like a small topic but cakes can get quite expensive so maybe keep the cake small and serve it just to you and the groom plus the parents and serve desert to the guests with their meals. DIY as much as you can. The brides bouquet you may want done by a florist but there are great tutorials out there for you to look at on DIY bouquets for the bridesmaids. Same goes with decorations. If you want alcohol, maybe do just beer and wine or BYOB. Hope this helps!

My budget was $10,000 and we are coming in around $9,450 for 106 guests. We did this buy serious bargain hunting. I found what we wanted online and watched sites for sales. Bought my ring on Overstock during Black Friday sales for $55, bought all of our linens (20 tablecloths, 15 overlays, and 130 chair sashes) on sale for a total of about $250, fake flower bouquets for me and 6 bridesmaids for $70...etc. We are doing Famous Dave's buffet at $13/pp and upgrading our dinnerware for $1.70/pp. We got a venue that lets us do BYOB with no bartender so we bought a bunch of beer and boxed wine from Total Wine for $500. Found an affordable DJ on Thumbtack, and would have used that site for an affordable officiant as well has our friend not offered to marry us. Made a special 3 hour package with a photographer to save major money. Would have stuck with a dress under $300 (check Modcloth and department stores) but one was gifted to me. It's really going to take some compromising and hard work depending on the size of your guest list, but it's totally doable.

Cutting your guest list & opting for a smaller ceremony will be your biggest saver especially on catering. Also opt for cheaper food options such as mexican, bbq or italian. Make DIY & budget bride groups on facebook your best friend! You can also save by doing things such as cheaper invites, skipping favors & skipping programs.

We live in a small town so I'm having people I know do the food and it's a little cheaper also doing the decorations ourselves. We are also going to a store for our cakes and going to a resale bridal show to see what kind of stuff I can pick up. Our budget is under $7000.

Cut your guest list, BbQ for dinner, smarty had a party for dinnerware, sams club or Costco flowers.