Want to get married , but don't want to be in debt forever tips please

[chocohead]

Me and my dp want to get married June this year if poss

I have started browsing and blimey some are so expensive

Has anyone any tips how to keep it cheap but nice

Have about 25 people at ceremony/meal and 120 at evening reception

depends how much leg work you are prepared to do and where you are..

Get intouch with wholesale flower supplier and skip the expensive florist prices.

Some of the most beautiful weddings we have been to in recent years haven't cost a fortune.

where are you in the uk?
what sort of wedding had you dreamed of
location for reception (june is not long!)

dress - ebay worn once!
reception working mens club - not much £100ish

daves disco from the local paper

you do the evening buffet

a meal after he ceremony at a restaurant with 5 close people.

asti spumanti as your toast atthe reception.

if you want to mak party davours - get some stiffwhite net cut into squares put in 4 sugared almonds tie with a ribbon put betwee two people at the reception.

on every talbe put one helium fulled ballon.

invitations try moonpig.com or print some off, or buy the pad type from stationers.

Here are some basic tips, the first of which is to chuck out the bridal magazines as they can only tell you about other people's weddings, not the one you want to have.
ONe useful tip is to try and book your wedding for a Friday or even a Thursday as most venues etc are cheaper if it's not a Saturday and the same goes for hotels etc for guests who will be staying over. OK some people will not be able to get time off work to come to a wedding in the week so you should perhaps run this by the most important guests before booking it.
Also, if you and DP already have a house full of soft furnishings and enough toasters, maybe when close friends ask what you'd like for a present you could ask them (depending on their skills etc) to do your flowers/bake your cake/lend you their vintage sportscar for wedding transport.
Again, depending on your budget and the attitude of friends and family, you could make your evening do a kind of 'everyone bring a bottle/something to eat' potluck (though some people really hate this type of event).
You could get your dress from a vintage clothing dealer rather than a wedding shop, not only less expensive but far more original. And, at the risk of getting a punch in the head from the MN advertising police, I do have a website which is an online resource for weddings (www.lovelifecelebrate.co.uk) which might be of interest.

you could always change it round from the norm and have a champagne (or other bubbly) reception with canapes for 120 people in the afternoon (cheaper for day hire than evening hire in some locations) then you don't have to shell out on a disco or evening buffet. Then in the evening a fabulous meal for the wedding party?!?

I contacted a local printing company directly with a design that I had done on the PC at home for our invitations etc. it worked out much cheaper that buying through the traditional routes.

We had orchids for buttonholes I found an orchid importer who sent the flowers to me directly

We worked to a strictly fixed budget and wanted to do some things fairly lavishly (fabulous hotel for wedding night, fly an impecunious bridesmaid in from NZ) so we were ruthless with other things.

Try not to mention "wedding" when you're ordering anything or the price will double instantly. I did my own flowers (potted orchids for table centrepieces, simple round posies of lisianthus (sp?) for me and the bridesmaids), which saved a load of money. We are lucky enough to have a couple of friends who are accomplished amateur photographers, so we asked them to take lots of candid photos. I hate posed photos so a wedding photographer was never on my list of priorities.

We skipped the DJ (personally I find them rather naff anyway) and simply loaded all our favourite music onto an iPod. My mum ended up bringing us a cake but if she hadn't, I would have done cupcakes on a tiered stand. It's probably different in the UK but we got married in Hong Kong, and the only traditional western wedding cake I could find was from the Mandarin Oriental and cost over 1,200 quid!

Whatever your budget, I would suggest thinking about the three or so things you'd be really upset to have to compromise on (for me it was the hotel, the honeymoon and the bridesmaid) and do those superbly, then skimp on everything else. That way you won't look back and feel you were deprived.

We did ours for under £5000, hired a village hall for reception, booze from france, table wine donated as wedding gift [lucky to have uncle high up at m&s], cake from m&s decorated with flowers done by a friend who also did bouquets, my dress from bhs, two little bridesmaids dresses from john lewis, finger buffet was about £5 a head from local co. friend of mil took up my dress, friend of my mother helpe decorate the hall, ask around everyone loves to get involved, people i didn't know, friends of parents were keen to help.

One of the very best weddings I have been to was done on a budget. They hired a school hall, sourced everything themselves and used a local caterer. The food was wonderful, the cake was out of this world and they had live music. It was personal and fab but I expect a reasonable amount of hard-work, too.

we had a wedding in august for just under £1000.

dress from debenhams
hair done myself
suit DH from burton
2 bridesmaid dresses from next
driven by friend in his lexus
register office ceremony
photos taken by guests
drinks and buffet at a very nice gastro pub
two cakes from tesco
DH's work mates put money together for a night in a very posh hotel

lots of help from friends and family plus ditched a lot of traditional stuff to have a unique wedding that was exactly how we wanted it.

forgot to say we have 25 guests

i would try to avoid venues out to capture the wedding market. we booked out an entire restaurant that we loved instead and it was way cheaper than we thought. and the quality if the food was better than at venues that would charge twice as much.

oh, and get a friend with a people carrier to take you to ceremony. so much easier to getinto in a big dress and WAY cheaper.

-Don't bother with wedding favours

-Get a student or a friend to do photos, lots of people with pretty decent cameras can take nice photos, you only need a couple of really nice ones (otherwise you are looking at upwards of 1k). DH did ours himself!

-Ipod plugged into PA system rather than DJ (then you only have your choice of songs and no annoying talking!)

-Don't both with anything unnecessary like a toastmaster , rolls royce (ring up some local taxi firms and ask if they have any black cabs, or drivers with mercs or similar)

-as for a cake, maybe get a lovely friend to make fairy cakes and get a fab stand off ebay, or personally (though my aunty made mine) I would have just wanted a big fat chocolate cake from M&S

-Monsoon wedding dresses are beautiful, I got mine from there and it is lovely.

What ever you do though don't decide to make your own invites and thank you cards. You will want to shoot yourself after the first 10! It's worth getting some printed, but they only have to be cheap and cheerful, they'll just get chucked anyway!

They get chucked!!! I keep all of mine! And I lovingly handcrafted the invites for my wedding [gutted emoticon]!!
Second gettinge verybody to take candid photos. Cake from M&S - mom bought mine and went to her local market and found a beautiful sugar flower display thing for about 7 quid. Dress from debenhams. We got married in Feb so a lot of stuff was in the Jan sales!!!! PILs bought DH a lovely suit as a wedding gift. We had only close family and friends and an afternoon 'hot' buffet as there were a lot of children and its so hard keeping them entertained through speeches and a meal so with the buffet (as well as being cheaper) they were eating happily whilst everybody else was toasting!!
We got all of our friends who's taken photo's to email them to me and I cropped and played around with them then put them into a 'memory book' from snapfish dot co dot uk. Its far more personal and a reasonable price. Everybody I've shown has commented on how original our wedding album is. No DJ my best friend made CD's of things we've danced to, cried to, laughed to etc over our 30 years of friendship and popped it on the hotel's stereo system. Now that was a priceless wedding gift. My dad bought the champagne for entrance drinks and toast as a wedding gift.

we got married in a little village church with a small group of family and friends and then went for late lunch at local pub aftewards. Ds wore jeans and I wore a summer dress i'd had for ages. I was so relieved not to have to bear the responsibilty of a full blown wedding job, was very special and right for us. Then we had a party at our house later for more friends, and got a cold buffet from the local Turkish restaurant.

i can second a friend to do photos - esp an artist friend. you could try asking local art school too.

wedding invites / order of service from a small local printer not wedding outlet. ours were fab and cost £35

ask your friends who did their cake. we found a friend of a friend who did it as a hobby. got fab cake for 60 for £80.

ipod for music -oh yes.

if you have time, look out on next holiday for wedding favours if you do want them. e got lovely sandalwood fans in spain [dh is spanish] for about 40 cents each.

in laws bought us honeymoon as pressie!

Friends went to a lovely wedding which was held at a local sports club, and they ordered chinese takeaway. Couple had done a booze cruise to get wine and beer.
For our wedding I made the cake, bought paper flowers and did all the bouquets and cake flowers (much easier than you'd think - another friend did all hers with silk flowers), mum made the bridesmaids dresses, and friends dad took me in their white Morris Minor.
You can get fab dresses from charity sales - Oxfam has special shops for wedding dresses, and the Sue Ryder sale my parents go to has a whole room of dresses dead cheap.
Personally, I don't see any point in an evening buffet if you are starting at 7 or so. If you have your ceremony at 2.30, then you won't be sitting down to eat your main meal till 4.30 ish, so you only need to provide food for your smaller number of guests.
Favours are pointless, as are fancy invites, so spend on the things that are important to you, and drop things that aren't.

We did ours for under £3000. Dress and bridesmaids dresses bought from BHS. Midday ceremony at registry office followed by meal for 45 at local restaurant. We didn't bother hiring cars (they are SO expensive) but got a friend to drive us. We bought cava from Tesco for the toast. Don't pay for bottles of mineral water on the table, just have jugs of tap water available (we did this and not one single person asked for mineral water). We didn't have an evening do as such but everyone came back to our house for drinks and takeaway pizza. Everyone said it was the best wedding they'd ever been to as it was so happy and relaxed. Other money-saving tips: we got a friend to make the cake, I made the invitations, we didn't bother with favours and we didn't have a wedding list but just asked for everyone to take photos and let us have copies so we didn't need to pay for a photographer.

my dear old dad organised a the local town's wedding photographer to come so we've got all these hideously cheesy photos of me and dh in soft focus trying not to corpse in the poses he ordered us into.

We asked everyone who was coming to tea or the evening do (we hired a village hall for the day) to bring some food. The result was enormous quantities of superb grub - far, far better than the usual dispirited chicken. The whole thing (church, dress, ring, hall, reception) came in at just a shade over £180. Plus the local ceilidh band for the evening, which tripled the price! We had 120 at the wedding and 100 for the evening do.

My friend did her own invites - pink card, then a slightly smaller cream heavy card, on which the details were printed - both cards were punched with two holes an inch apart, and tied together one on top of the other with taffeta ribbon. Cost her something in the region of £8 and some ink, looked beautiful.

And my cousin did the age old lottery-tickets-as-favours-in-pretty-envelopes-sealed-with-wax number. Was kinda cute.

Other than that, do what you WANT to do, you'll remember how happy you were, not how many people ate quiche in a village hall somewhere

First make a list of what is important and what is not.

For us (well me - being honest) - cake was not important (cannot remember one wedding that I've been to where I've thought what a lovely cake) - and I hate fruit cake. MIL made ours and put fresh flowers on it.

I made our own wedding invitations and order of service. It was not a chore - I had two invitation making afternoons with friends on a production line for the price of 3 bottles of wine. V.cheap.

We got a lecturer in floristry (if that is the correct term) from the local college create our flowers - almost cost price.

Whilst you need to stick to a budget, try and remember what is important to you.

Oh yes, and we walked from home to the church - 1.5 miles, as it's in the next village along. And 50 of the guests walked with us - in December, in Scotland. It made a really nice start to the day.

The only large expense at ours was the rings, and clearly that was easily mitigated if we'd wanted to.

First, as others have said, only buy into those aspects of a trad wedding that are important to you, not family, not friends, you as a couple.

Choosing an unpopular day is good, we got married on a Monday and so had our pick of slots at the registry office.

We had a champers reception at the hotel, with just enough people that they gave us one of the hotel bars for nothing, good move. Then a meal at a local restaurant, which I told them was a "family party" (45 of us, though, not 120) as everything goes up hugely in price if you say it's for a wedding. As it was end of Nov, they were actually offering their Xmas menu for 20% off so I just told everyone they had to order off the Xmas menu! Bargain! That won't work in June, though ... (but booking a venue saying it's a family party may save you a shedload).

No photographer, in fact I got random strangers to take pictures of us all in the local park.

FWIW, I do keep hand-made invitations, wouldn't expect anyone to have kept one of mine, which were just the bog standard 'fill in the blanks' jobbies from WHSmith.

Favours - one lovely wedding I went to with a butterfly theme (reception in Kew Gardens, fabulous) the favours were packets of seeds, hand tied with ribbons and whatnot. Well the packets of seeds themselves cost all of 10p from Wilcos. But it was a lovely gesture, plant some wild flowers to encourage the butterflies.

And congratulations!

We are getting married in November and having a late afternoon ceremony (civil ceremony in a hotel) and then just having champagne and canapes all night.

Ipod for music, flower girl (dd) dress from BhS/Debenhams and mine from US website. They're much cheaper and with the dollar being so weak, you save a fortune at the moment. No cake, minimal flowers (just my bouquet and dd's posy), then lots of candles for the ceremony. Friends taking photos. No favours. Making very simple invites. Save so much by not having a sit down meal (still having speeches etc)

We're then just taking our close family (parents, siblings and dc's and a couple of friends) for a meal in a lovely restaurant the following day

HTH

x

Our reception in a village hall was fantastic - cheap, laid back, lots of fun.

Wine by the case from Majestic

Flowers, low key and simple. We had gerbera and beargrass - took almost no preparation at all and were beautiful.

Get friends involved - use their talents/cars/perks - our friends really enjoyed being a big part of the wedding, and all our music, including ceilidh band, came from friends.

Food I was fussy about, but got a good deal from very very good caterer by having cold meats (salami, smoked venison, parma ham etc), good cheeses, fresh bread. All beautifully laid out, etc, and not a cheap option, but so much cheaper than hot food, and really really good - people still talk about it!

Thankyou so much for all your replies, so many ideas i hadn't thought of

my idea at the mo is to have early ceremony 11 ish then hire a hall in the arvo with a buffet, then just come home 5 ish and anyone who wants to come with us can. My dd will be happier at home at a reasonable time
If not i would probably spend the reception battling with a tired little girl !
Nothing booked yet thou, must sort soon and stop eating cake !
x