Weddingbee Blog

A few months back, Mr. S and I were really stressing out over the wedding. Specifically, we were stressing over paying for the wedding. What I didn’t disclose at the time was that, right after we got engaged, a relative promised us a certain amount of money. After we worked out our budget and paid deposits to all of our vendors, that relative told us that they’d be giving us much, much less. It was really rough. By that point, we were kind of stuck. Our options included drastically changing the wedding we were going to have, or going into debt by taking out a loan or paying for the wedding with credit cards.

Both options were really unattractive, and it was a hard decision, but in the end, we realized that we didn’t want to have a different wedding. We wanted the wedding that we’d been planning the whole time. So we chose to save as much money as we could, and go into as little debt as possible for the balance of the wedding.

Well, this week, Mr. S and I were going over the budget, and we came to the realization that we won’t have to go into debt for the wedding! We’re going to be able to afford it!

Source

Here is how we’re doing it:

We got help from family. We’re not doing it alone. Our family is helping us out a bit, and their contributions will end up paying for about 20% of our wedding.

We cut the guest list. I shed a lot of tears over this, but we ended up cutting about 10 people from our guest list. It sounds terrible to quantify it like I’m about to, but that alone saved us about a thousand bucks.

We began to save, save, save. We decided to cut out a lot of things from our everyday budget:

• Food - Right around the time we started trying to save money, we also started dieting. Almost immediately, it was apparent how much less money we were spending per month. We’re probably saving about $150-$200 a month just by eating healthy and cutting out fast food, and junk food, and cutting waaaaaaay down on restaurants and alcohol. We also stopped buying expensive coffee drinks every morning, and now I just drink some tea at work.
• Clothing - I’ve admitted it before: I’m a shopper. Well, I’ve almost completely stopped buying clothes. I say almost completely, because there were a few necessities (my winter coat was falling apart and since I’ve lost weight, some of my old clothes are too big) but I was very frugal. I bought just the basics and got it all on sale.
• Entertainment - We were on the 5 at a time Neflix plan and now we only get 2 DVDs at a time. We pretty much stopped going to movies or doing any expensive recreational activities.
• Transportation - I was paying $80 a month for my monthly transit pass to get to and from work. But, we realized that my office was pretty much on the way to Mr. S’s office, so now he picks me up and drops me off.
• Utilities - We turned our air conditioning off on September 1st and didn’t turn our central heat on until November 1st. We probably saved about $300 in those two months alone.

We used budgeting tools. We started using Mint.com to balance our budgets. It’s amazing how easy it is to control what you spend when you have a wonderful and free tool to help you balance your budget.

And that’s it! We’ve got a few months to go, but I’ve projected our budget out until Wedding Day and we’ll be okay! WAHOOOOOOO!!!! I’m so relieved that we’ll get to have the wedding we want without going into debt! We’ll even be able to afford our minimoon!

Did you need to save money for your wedding? How did you do it?