Saving Money While Getting Married

So, you are getting married. Congratulations! Did you know the wedding does not have to cost you an arm and a leg. Honestly, you may not want to do some of these things, and I certainly can understand why, but there are ways to save on wedding expenses.

My wife and I had been planning a 'traditional', fairly big sized wedding for Memorial Day weekend (12 years ago), when we learned we needed to move it up. The first thought most people have upon hearing that is, my wife (then Fiancé) was pregnant. This was not the case. Her father was fighting a losing battle with cancer and we needed to quickly move up the wedding to make sure he was there. The whole thing was put together in a week's time and a week after we were married, he passed away.

Because of the need to speed things along, gone was the wedding hall as the ceremony took place in my wife's parents' house. I can understand how most people would want to get married at a church, synagogue or wedding hall, and have the reception there as well, but it is certainly cheaper to do it in the house. I know people who have nice big backyards and had an outdoor wedding. They then brought caterers to their house for the reception.

Speaking of the reception, instead of having a fancy catered wedding, we had deli platters. Again, this was far from the ideal and something that most people would not want, but it was a way to cut down on the expense, although not the reason we did it.

Then there was the wedding dress. My wife had found a nice dress and it would have been ready for a May wedding, but there was no way it could be ready for a February wedding. As a result, my wife went to a number of department stores and ended up buying something off the rack. It did not have a train and it was not meant to be a wedding dress but more than one person has been mistaken upon looking at the pictures of our wedding, thinking it was a wedding dress. If you look hard enough, you might be able to find 'just the right thing'.

Of course, considering we only had immediate family there (a total of about 30 people), it was a lot cheaper than what it would have cost had we invited all 300 people who had been on our guest list at the time we moved things up. Okay, that number would have been cut, but it still would have been high.

While this was not the wedding either my wife or I had envisioned, neither one of us would have changed it as it allowed her father to be there. In addition, while this was not the reason or the plan, we did learn a lot about ways you can save on putting the wedding together.