Planning tips

Definitely keep your guest count down if you can!

Your largest expenses will be your venue and caterer to research, research, research. Also, get married on a weekday or Sunday if you're comfortable with that; it'll save you thousands on the venue!

I think the biggest thing you'll want to do, if you haven't already, is sit down with your fiancé and decide on a budget - do your research, and be realistic. There are many beautiful weddings that have taken place for $10k or less, while the average wedding costs seem to be climbing between $30-$50k. Ex: If flowers are important to you and you live in a moderate to expensive city, budget $4k, not $500 (the $4k was based on my vision/area so yours may be different!). Now take the budget you created and add 10%-25%....it'll seem crazy high right now, but it's better to overestimate and save or have the funds for that unexpected cost than to be unprepared.

Once you have this number, make a savings plan for the wedding! During planning, my husband and I looked at two money factors:

1. If I strictly divide $X budget by Y number of paychecks from now until wedding day, we need to save $Z per paycheck.

2. After paying all of our monthly essentials (bills, groceries, savings/401K, etc) we have $A leftover from our paycheck. $Z is our monthly payment to meet our budget determined above....let's put as much of $A toward the wedding early on so we can relax closer to the wedding. Since a lot of vendors have a similar payment plan of initial deposit and final payment (sometimes with a smaller middle payment in between) you'll be spending a lot of money up front, and a lot at the very end. So if you save more aggressively up front, you can relax toward the end and focus more on the actual wedding day and not the budget

Start thinking of things you want for decor and such now!! I would also start saving money as soon as you can, even if it is a little bit here and there. You have a good chunk of time to go, so every little bit helps. A few things we did to save money are:

1. doing wood flowers from Sola. They have great sales all the time. I will get all my flowers (8 bouquets, 5 corsages, and 16 boutonnieres for like $100-150)

2. We didn't do Save the Dates and found invites from Anns Bridal Bargain for $.99 (RSVP card included)!

3. Our catering was cheap -- only $9.50 a plate. So for this I would check out a lot of different places. Our place is a meat processing place, so not sure if that's why they're so cheap.

4. Doing DIY for programs, accom cards, and all decorations. Etsy has tons of templates, so you can print yourself which saves a ton of money!

5. Cake from Hyvee

6. Reception hall from Elks Lodge hall

Try to list out things that you don't want to go cheap on and see where you can keep things low. Remember things don't need to be super fancy. At the end of the day, it's all about who you share the day with. Hope this helps

Hi Summer,
Congratulations, all of us brides have stress, it just goes with wedding planning, once you figure out your guest list, book your venue, pick a photographer, decide on your colors, you should be more relaxed, the best part for me was shopping for my dress, you'll be fine, everything will fall into place!

My fiancé and I are paying out of pocket too for our October 2020 wedding. We sat down and got realistic about our budget and how much we would have to save each paycheck individually to reach that goal. It definitely helped because we know how much automatically needs to be put aside, and we try to put a little extra when we can for just in case costs. As for booking vendors, we booked each one at a time so we weren’t hit with having to put down deposits all at once. Definitely start with the venue as that will be the biggest one and work from there. Plus vendors usually ask you for you’re date when booking. Last advice I would give is to have options for each vendor depending on price. For example, we wanted a rustic venue so we visited one that included catering and one that did not. We ultimately went with the one that didn’t have catering because we had the option to find a cheaper caterer within our budget. Wishing you all the best with your planning!

1. We kept our guest list down although we have added some back on.

2. Went to a venue that gave us the most for our money and kept our reception and ceremony in the same place.

3. I buy things with each check with coupons at michaels and hobby lobby or on amazon after price comparisons.

4. We decided by doing how much a month we could each put in. We could each $250 towards the venue and still have leftovers to do fun things and pay bills and put aside money for later purchases such as our rings, accessories, attire and other things we will need for the wedding.

Shop after major holidays like after Xmas, after Valentine's, etc.

View Quoted Comment Thanks so much ♥️

View Quoted Comment Thank you so much for the advice !!!

View Quoted Comment Thank you sooo much 😁 super helpful and your totally right!

View Quoted Comment Thank you!!! ❤️

View Quoted Comment Thank you 😊 such a smart idea to just do one vendor at a time!

View Quoted Comment Yes we booked it so far out so we could make sure that we could save as much as possible for it 😁 I appreciate it !

We’re paying out of pocket as well, and can’t afford to spend more than about $4,000 total. I found out that the National park does wedding ceremony permits for $250 and that cut down on costs tremendously. Most every state has at least one beautiful outdoor area that you can use for little to no cost. We’re also making our own food, which is possible because we can only have a max of 60 people Including us, the photographer, and the officiant. We are also planning on doing our reception at a rental house that will double as accommodations for a large number of our out of town guests (I found one that sleeps 26 people) so that will be a shared cost and will be about $172/person for a 3 night stay as opposed to $200/night at the nearby hotels.


Best advice, get creative. You can make anything beautiful with the right decorations. The best choice I made was the National Park. It’ll save me a fortune on ceremony decorations since we can’t have any. So I can focus that money on reception decor and food instead.

View Quoted Comment Such a good idea ! Thanks!

View Quoted Comment Yes girl oh my gosh so I’m currently living in Houston Texas I recently moved here from Colorado all my family is in CO and We are looking at about 60 guests as well maybe less as my fiancé’s family flying out to CO so lodging is important but I’m having a issue finding a venue within our budget a mountain wedding is my dream that’s my home some national parks as well don’t accommodate 60 guests or don’t have parking or don’t have this or that 😞 so it’s a bummer I won’t lose hope we have time to look I have our colors and little details picked out and my sister is amazing and will be helping me with making decor such as flower arrangements ect! But thank you for your advice I soooooo appreciate it

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I plan to do that for some of the candy that we want but I am nervous about doing it for chocolate still this early so it will be the other ones we will use.

View Quoted Comment Best of luck! We’re renting 15 passenger vans from enterprise to counter the parking issue xD and RMNP has 2 Locations that can hold up to 60 and 1 that can hold up to 100 certain times of the year. Options are out there you just have to try to find them. Maybe have a destination wedding to Colorado .


Good that your sister is making the floral arrangements, I’m sure they’re look fabulous.

View Quoted Comment Yes I’m definitely doing it in Colorado I’ll keep looking I guess once we settled on a date I got super overwhelmed once I started to see just how much it could cost us 😩 but it’s okay I’m sooooo excited ! She’s also helping with anything decor wise so I’m so thankful! Just need to get the rest figured out thank you again ❤️

View Quoted Comment That’s good! Yeah, I originally had a very different plan, but we decided we just couldn’t afford to spend the $15,000 it was going to cost xD so we massively sized down. It’s not your traditional Mountain wedding, but it’s going to be just as beautiful. The vacation rental is also going to double as our rain backup, since the park doesn’t have one. It’s still in Estes Park, so it’s still got the amazing mountain backdrop.