Savvy Shopping for Your Wedding

Every person set on joining their lives together with another wants their ceremony to be perfect. Each one wants to make a lasting impression on every single person at the wedding. I'm sure you are no exception.

But every year many, many people spend thousands of extra dollars on weddings that may or may not be memorable. Sure, you can have a fantastic event for $50,000, but you don't have to spend that kind of money to have a wonderful, individual, fun and memorable service.

There are many ways to cut costs for your wedding, but I want to focus on just one area: where you shop. Here is a cardinal rule:

Don't shop at any store or in any catalog that says "bridal" or has a bridal theme unless you've comparison shopped elsewhere. In almost every case, just adding the name or the thought of "bridal" inflates the cost of everything in the store or the book.

Take the case of candles, for instance. Candles are wonderful for wedding decorations. Votive candles, especially, not only look beautiful on tables at the reception, but make lovely favors for family members and special friends to take home. However, there is no real difference between the votive candles you buy in most wedding shops and catalogs and the ones you buy in the dollar store.

Do you really think that if you pay $1 per candle and holder at a dollar store, everybody is going to look at them and immediately think, "cheap?:" Well, let me assure you, they won't. Some of the prettiest holders and candles I have ever seen have been in discount stores, and I have seen the same ones in bridal catalogs for five times the price.

Dollar stores, in fact, are also wonderful sources for containers for edible favors or potpourri. I recently bought one dollar packages of 8 small favor boxes and of 8 paper cones at Dollar Tree, identical to the ones I saw in a catalog for $15 for 12.

Another great place to shop for wedding decorations and favors is on Ebay. If you don't want to bother bidding, you can get excellent prices on many smaller wedding items with the "Buy It Now" option.

Invitations are another costly item for weddings. If you have a good printer, you can buy very nice printable ones atmost office supply stores, and print them yourself for about a third of the cost of ordering them printed.

Catalogs are great sources for ideas, but you can often adapt these ideas yourself, and save a lot of money. For instance, personalized candy bar wrappers are wonderful for creating candy favors. Do a search on Google, as I did, and you will find that you can print them yourself online for free, at a number of websites. All you need then is some candy bars and a glue gun to seal the wrappers, and you've saved a lot of money. Or, just today I saw a very cute idea: heart-shaped cookie cutters attached to personalized cards. These would be great to use as both favors and place cards. All you have to do to save money is go and buy a set of plastic or metal cookie cutters in the kitchen section of a discount store or grocery and make your own cards, and they won't cost you $38, the price in this particular catalog for 12.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: Don't let vanity cause you to spend unnecessary money where it won't be noticed. If you want to splurge, splurge on the three things people really remember: the gown, the flowers, and the food, in that order. Everything else is even more wonderful if you don't have to spend the honeymoon money to get it.