To ask for your 'cheap' wedding tips

[InTheBirdBox]

Me and DP have recently gotten engaged.

I hear that the average wedding costs around £17,000.00 which I just find incredible (and we have no where near that much to spend on one).

Does anyone have any tips on keeping down costs? Things that worked for you maybe?

I want it to be a nice day to share with family and friends but I'm not overly extravagant so I'm hoping I can easily do it for less!!

Congratulations, OP!

My advice is to decide on your priorities- we don’t care about cars, for example, so didn’t have a fancy wedding car. I bought my dress secondhand because it was cheaper that way - it had only been worn for a day before 😂 We know what gets our friends up and dancing, so we made an iPod playlist and hired speakers and lights for our evening do - so no expensive band or DJ. My MIL made our wedding cake (she made a gorgeous fruit cake, so this wasn’t a sacrifice!!) and me and one of my bridesmaids decorated it.

Most of our budget was spent on food and drink because that was what was important to us.

I think the key to having a lovely budget wedding is to work out what your priorities are, what matters a bit and what doesn’t matter at all, and then allocate your spending accordingly.

For photos give these people a go, they did ours and they are beautiful. We paid £219 for 2 hours photography which was enough for us. All the other photographers we looked at wanted us to commit to a 5 hour session at about £1K!

www.bigdayproductions.co.uk/includes/wedding-packages-image-only.html

We got all the pics on a USB stick so we could choose which ones we wanted to print. Our photographer Irina was brilliant.

We also asked guests to take pics and although they tried, most of them were blurred so we're glad we had someone sober there who was paid to do the job.

For those that had a church wedding can I ask how much that set you back? I'm happy with either. If I was being choosy I'd say church but if it's expensive I'd be happy with registry office.

My one bridesmaid will be a little girl who I will have to buy a dress for but it's very important to me so that's something I'm happy to pay for.

We got married on a Sunday at 3pm so only one meal to cater for

But the Monday was a bank holiday

I think our church was about £500

Bells and heating are more

Barns are surprisingly expensive OP, as are marquees. Particularly if you need to hire things for them. I'd probably look at hotels out of seasons and/or relatively short notice. They often have excellent deals. As do places that are just getting established and building up a reputation. If you find somewhere that's only been going a couple of months they might well give you a few quid off in exchange for social media, using your photos in publicity etc. This goes not just for hotels but bands, flowers etc.

If you're having day and evening guests, yes you do need to feed them both but you don't have to go for the most expensive options. Hot buffet for day guests rather than table service is fine- table service is where it gets expensive. Something like hot sandwiches in the evening is good and typically cheaper than a finger buffet. Bacon sarnies, burgers, that type of thing. Afternoon tea seems quite fashionable but I've not been to a wedding with that yet so can't say. Some people do cake rather than a dessert for the main and that's fine.

Nine times out of ten, favours are a waste of time, effort and frankly of the planet's resources, and people just get pissed and leave them. Don't bother.

DH and I married last year, wedding cost us about £4,000, including my mum buying my dress a shop a gift to me, and FIL paying for my friend's band to play.

We didn't want guests to have to pay for anything on the day, so our spending priorities were on drink and food. So we found lots of ways to save!

The biggest saving we made was in not having a photographer. Just didn't see the point, we both hate posing for photos, and EVERYBODY has a decently camera on their phones these days, and our guests were friends/family who wanted to take our picture... so we couldn't figure out why we would pay thousands for a stranger to have us stand about in awkward poses all day.

Saved loads, and nobody had to be bored by hours of pictures! (Including us, we wanted to get on with partying!) But I do have literally HUNDREDS of photos from the day from friends putting them on social media.

I would urge more couples to consider having a non-photographer wedding, unless you are very passionate about having professional, posed pictures. With new technology, I just don't believe it's necessary.

Go for seasonal UK flowers. I got married in March and bought 200 bunches of daffodils online. enough for a really colourful abundant display and only about 100 quid!

We spent about £5000 in total.

Church wedding itself was relatively cheap. I wore a £100 sale ivory bridesmaid dress with a £150 Etsy overskirt and had a family friend do some alterations as a wedding gift. Village hall reception - £12 per hour hall rental! The bar in the village hall was also insanely cheap and our guests didn’t even spend the £1000 for drinks we had budgeted! My parents and their friends worked incredibly hard to decorate the hall with fabric (to make it look like a tent), foliage etc. Flowers from a local lady in the village - went for seasonal flowers and didn’t go mad! Crockery bought from eBay and charity shops. Lots of handmade bits for table decorations etc. Afternoon tea (Waitrose sandwich platters, roped the mums into making cakes and scones) and a fish and chip van worked out much cheaper than a fancy meal and went down really well. Invites and order of service were designed by a family member. Hair and makeup were done by family friends. Didn’t have adult bridesmaids and the flower girls wore dresses from the Monsoon sale. Rings we got a big discount on as we have a jeweller in the family. Photographer was a local art college photography student who was trying to build her portfolio so much cheaper than a well established professional and the pictures came out beautifully.

I think my mum was stressed for about 6 months (I had hyperemesis and she took on a lot of the organising) but it turned out better than I could have dreamed.

There is a flat fee for Church of England weddings OP - it’s on the CofE website (which is remarkably helpful for wedding planning) but off the top of my head it’s about £470. We also paid for the organist and verger but it was only a nominal amount more.

Spoken to DP and he would like something in his mum and Dad's field for afterwards. They have a very large plot of land in the Welsh countryside which with a Marquee I agree would be beautiful.

What are people thoughts on this? My worry is with Marquee hire and catering it may well be more expensive than a venue. He wants to attempt our own food (with the help of his mum) but I'm not sure.

For info I'm thinking our ceremony count will be no more than 50 and with the evening guests will be 80 maybe 90 at a push.

We considered a marquee but in he end found the cost was far more than we found sensible (you have to factor in toilets, a generator etc. as well) which is why we ended up draping the village hall in fabric!

M&S for your cake. This is mine and cost £108 well it should’ve been but there was a mark on two tiers (hidden by ribbon anyway) and as they couldn’t get replacements in time we had free of charge

Get your dress in a sample sale, only invite the absolutely necessary people and do what YOU want to do - not what you think people will expect you to do! We ended up spending about 10k

Mine was in Cheshire, I found a naice gastro pub which had a tiny barn licenced for weddings, they did an afternoon tea with prosecco, I made cocktails and paid corkage for these. I decorated the barn myself with fabric and paper flowers I made myself. I sourced bud vases candle holders and used supermarket flowers for the tables. My cake was £80 and I got sainsburys cupcakes which were £6.50 for 12. I bought sweet jars, sweets and stripey bags, I hired a marquee for £1.5k for the evening part which included flooring, tables, tables. Cloths and chairs, dance floor and bar, I bought lights and bunting to decorate that and the garden behind the pub and barn as well as lanterns for the garden, garden games, and hired a bouncy castle. For the evening we had a bbq who did it for £12.50 per head Inc crockery and cutlery which they took away. I bought loads of soft drinks and booze Inc pimms prosecco, white and wed wine and there was cocktails still left over. I hired 2 staff to help clear up and hired a sound system and put my own tunes together on my laptop instead of a dj. Ibought bright coloured plastic wine Glasses. Made napkins. Made own invites and designed own wedding stationary. My dress was off ebay, I got my bridesmaid dresses and shoes in the sales. . The biggest costs aside from the catering and marquee were bridal flowers and photograher. All in all it was about £7k and included all food and drink for 50 day and additional 30 evening.

Hire something like a large barn or country house for the weekend that allows parties; you should be able to control the cost alot more. I.e. dress it how you like with lights, bunting, flowers/plants etc. Do a cold buffet or bring in a hot roast. Buckets of booze scattered about...

If you're using PIL field, I'd look into.a barbecue. I'm told they're one of the cheaper catering options. You could always do sides and desserts yourselves to keep costs down.

I would absolutely love the idea of PIL field IF I could be sure of the weather.

I'm thinking if it was sunny/nice out it would be perfect, the kids could play outside etc...but if it's raining it kind of puts a damper on the day.

Gosh I didn't quite realise how much there was to plan or think about!

Elope.

Failing that, don't tell a venue your event is for a wedding. The price will double.

If you get some one you know to do photos make sure they know what they are doing. Not say they know what they are doing; actually KNOW what they are doing. There's a difference.

I've had loads of friends do this and miss important moments of the day. Fortunately I'm a snap happy muppet who has saved the day three times by knowing where to be at the right time and what shots are the important ones - you know like bride is driven by father in his classic car and the designated mate taking photos has disappeared off the face of the earth to wait for the bride in the ceremony room and misses the very sentimental and important moment...

Best thing to do is to make a list of the important shots for your photographer and say beyond that just go with the flow. Oh and always get a few fixed group photos even if it's not your thing. It keeps the family happy. And for god sake ask more than one mate to do it if you don't get a professional wedding photographer.

I'd assume you would need some kind of marquee to use a field in Wales. Is there direct access from a road or would people either be traipsing through the house or through more field?

What's the bog situation?

Get married later in the day...just 1 meal to provide

I got married at 4pm and had an evening reception only. Buffet and disco, no sit down meal. Did my own hair and makeup, no bridesmaids or best man, no car (DF drove me to the church and DH drove us to the reception, parked the car outside and collected it the next day). We got a taxi home and slept in our own bed to avoid paying for a hotel (the reception finished after midnight so a hotel would have been a waste). No hen or stag. No honeymoon.

Costs were something like:
Ceremony £200
Reception £1500
Clothes and accessories £1200
Rings £700
Flowers £200
Photographer £700
Total £4500

We could probably have saved another £1000 if we’d chosen cheaper clothes and rings.