How did you pay?

Paying as we go.

Cash. Everything in cash (via our debit card). If we don't have the money for it, then it ain't gonna happen.

My parents gave us some money but FH and I are paying for most of it ourselves. We refuse to go into debt for it, so we save a little each month. We are using the money my parents gave us for all the deposits and what we save will be to pay the rest off. We sat down and made a budget to see what we realistically could save in a year.

We are actually not using any of our prior savings for the wedding. When we got engaged we each started putting x amount into a combined wedding savings separate from our general savings!

Pay as we go! We got engaged in Aug 2016 and getting married May 2018 to give us some time to save.

We've always been pretty aggressive with our savings (we've known for a few years that we want to get married and buy a bigger place in the coming years, so for either purpose we needed to save up). Our parents are contributing some, which is appreciated, but we created a budget that we could cover by ourselves and then designed the rest around what we could afford.

If you haven't yet, sit down together and go through your finances and discuss how much you can afford, how you want to go about saving/paying, and how this compares with how you envision your wedding. It also can't hurt to bring into the discussion some medium- or long-term financial goals as well. Like everyone else suggested, I wouldn't go into debt for it. Weddings are lovely, but not worth that headache

We have money saved already and we are still saving as we go. We've set a budget and are trying to stick to that budget as much as possible.

We're using a combination of cash and credit cards. We put larger items on the credit cards for rewards. But we also pay them back off.

We have a set amount that we put into our savings each month for the wedding.

We've had a long engagement (28 months) and are paying off things as we go.

I always knew I wanted a wedding so I started saving and even if I didn't have one, it was money I could use for something else. FH saves as well. We left a large deposit down on everything, this way there isn't a huge balance and it's less we have to worry about later on. Never take out a loan or use a credit card.

We have a lot of savings because even before wedding planning we budgeted. Since getting engaged we took a harder look at our finances and figured out how we could save more between now and the wedding.

I understand saving isn't doable for some - if your income is low even just with rent/food/cars, money goes quick. I'd figure out how much "play" money you have every month after bills, and make it a point to save that amount each month.

We had a long engagement as FH wanted to wait til he got his degree=made sense to us. We were paying as we went while he was working part time/full time student & worked full time. We had all deposits paid plus some, rings, dress, centerpieces, etc were already paid…when health issues set us back/FH wasn’t able to work for quite some time. We decide to sell our camper & the proceeds allowed us to eliminate a vehicle loan (eases up the monthly bills) & pay off the rest of the wedding. Things are starting to turn up for us again so that’s nice to see before the wedding.

We booked our date 2.5 years in advance and started saving! We also got some very generous help from our engagement party that helped a lot

We have a savings plan for the big ticket items (which in our case is catering/venue). Every penny we can squeeze until the wedding is going into our wedding fund. The other items, we're paying as we go. We've started buying a set $ amount of décor items per paycheck until the wedding not using our wedding fund. Our STDs, invitations and vendor deposits were also paid that way. I'm not a fan of long engagements (ours is only 8 months long) but others on this forum have used a longer engagement to be able to save more money to pay for their wedding.

We paid all deposits and final bills in checks. I might have paid cash for my dress, and small online orders like invitations went on my debit card. Nothing with a credit card.

We had a decent amount saved already and then continued to saved over the last 10 months we've been engaged. We also were very honest with what we could afford. Definitely not going into debt for a fancy party!

We pay for everything on a CC that we pay off each month. We set a budget of what we could afford each month at the beginning, and committed to paying that much each month towards the wedding, even if it was taking out cash for the next month's bills. We've also each picked up overtime to pay for the honeymoon and extras that we decided we wanted (ie chocolate covered strawberries!).

Installments are our friend. Each time we get paid, we buy a little here and a little there. But we started purchasing a year in advance

We planned our budget based on what we could afford. Both of us had some miscellaneous existing savings, the kind that we would use for getaways or hobbies and we added to that whatever we felt we could save each month.

Our one rule was that we wanted to pay off everything a couple of months before the wedding. That helped a lot in making decisions about what to include and what to forgo.