Paying for a MODEST wedding

[lilypoppet]

So, I'm the mother of the bride. Not much money available. Have agreed to pay for a reception in a manor house costing £4000 for 50 guests. Not easy! Went to a wedding dress shop. Big mistake. Assistant was nice at first, but when we were looking at an £800 the assistant really pressurised us, even though DD was not sure. We had the strength of mind to say no, we are going to sleep on it, and the assistant proper sulked! DD decided to just buy a second hand one on ebay for £200, Guest list is a nightmare as we only have 50 wedding guest places. Has anyone got any advice? I am certainly learning a lot about weddings!

Dresses, have a look at Wed2B. Buy off the rack, prices are fixed, no ordering in. Have a look online, no need to book an appointment.

Guest list - you might be paying, but it isn't your guest list. Your daughter and the groom need to be picking their list. What do they want?

Well, the big costs of clothing and reception are covered! What does your reception include? Is that both food and drink or do you need to budget for drinks as well? (Assume half a bottle of wine per adult at the meal, 2-3 glasses of bubbles or soft drinks for drinks reception and toast). Just ask for jugs of tap water on the table.

Flowers, the last 3 weddings I went to didn't have flowers on the tables for the meal. They are increasingly being restricted to the church and the bridal bouquet.

Invites - do these yourself.

Cake - you can buy /order plain white iced cake tiers from M&S and then decorate.

I cut my budget by concentrating on what was important to us. No fancy cars, no flowers, no bridesmaids, no fancy cake - and concentrated on having a great reception with the people we wanted there to celebrate. What areas could you " chop" to keep costs down?

Oh for the guest list- a friend had a similar issue, she split it in 3, brides family, grooms family, then their friends. Remember to include yourself!

Ask the bride and groom to make a list, look honestly, is it not possible to keep to 50 given the family size? If so, a different venue that's cheaper per head might be needed.

There are so many savings you can make

I bought my wedding dress from a department store in the sales for £50

We got a cab instead of wedding car

Depending on time of year, you can grow flowers for table. I had a massive party in the summer once and used cornflowers I’d grown from seed and put them in jam jars - cost virtually nothing

Venue and catering are the big cost - does it have to be a Manor House?

We got married last year, spent a small fortune and had a guest list of 125! (DH has a large family and lots of friends) weddings can so easily blow up so I would recommend getting you daughter and her fiancé to write a list (separately) of the things the want, then rank them in order of importance to them, then compare lists. We found it helps rule out unnecessary "wants"

WRT guest list, again, they need to decide who the people are that they want to share their day. For some people, that means more friends than family... (ie a friend known since school over great Aunty Norma who you haven't seen in 10 years)

And have lots of fun helping your daughter plan if she asks for your input. My mum was my sounding board for my ideas (even if she didn't agree with me) sadly she died 3 months before our wedding, but I was so pleased she got to visit the venue & church, see my dress, heard the song I walked down the aisle to, etc. That's what your daughter needs while planning - someone to help and listen

Can’t you just give them the amount of money you can contribute and leave it to them? Otherwise you will end up contributing much more which isn’t fair.

It’s their wedding - transfer the £4000 or whatever and let them get on with it.

You e got the dress and the reception. That’s the basics of a wedding. Our reception was the most expensive part, the second most expensive was our photographer at over £1000 for the day, and I was disappointed with his work.
So what else do you need
Photographer . Could you enquire at your local college, they may have students doing a suitable course.
Flowers. If you want a modest wedding, keep flowers to a minimum. A bouquet for the bride only and a button hole each for the groomsmen can be done economically.
Cars. Would a taxi or a couple of taxis get the bridal party to the venue. Wedding cars cost a couple of hundred minimum. Three cabs, will keep costs down.
Bridesmade dresses can be bought from [http://myeveningdress.co.uk/] and I can testify that they are good quality and fast delivery as I got my bridesmades dresses from her at about £30 each
We didn’t get the bridesmaids shoes, we told them to wear something they’d be comfortable in for a full day.
You don’t need a free bar.
You don’t need to give gifts to all the bridal party.
You don’t need a lot of the extras.
For the extras you can’t imagin this wedding without use eBay.

We printed our own invites. I did my own hair and makeup. Got a taxi to the church. No bridesmaids or best man. No cake - we had cupcakes. No honeymoon. No hotel - we went home after the reception. Still spent £4.5k, most of which went on reception and clothes/ rings.

My tip: trim out all the nonsense about what you “must do” because it’s a “tradition” and just focus on what actually matters.

Things we aren’t having for our wedding : fancy cars, expensive wedding dress (my budget is £200), wedding favours, pricey stag and hen parties, huge numbers of flowers (flower girl will have a bouquet, that’s it), free bar (we are paying for 3 drinks per person, they can buy any extra they want).

It’s actually quite liberating to ignore that the wedding industry tells you you should do!

Guest list - be ruthless. Everyone understands that people have limited numbers and won’t be offended. So stick to the number you can invite.

The manor house is saving us money as it is all under one roof. Great idea about the flowers for bride and groom only. There will be no cars needed as everyone is under one roof. The 4 k includes ceremony, reception, food, half a bottle of wine for each guest, wedding planner and evening do with reception. Its a good deal because the wedding is in April on a Tuesday, so not a popular day. People will have to buy their own drinks and we will pre-warn them about the cost of drinks in the manor house. I agree about the no gifts for anyone. Thanks that's a great help.

Encourage DD to think about what she could do with the amount of money something costs, eg. Seat covers for £200 and I thought about all the things I could buy for £200 so decided against that.
We paid for shirts and ties for best man and ushers and they wore own suits and high street for bridesmaid dresses.
Also weigh up whether a wedding cake is worth it.

I think a Tuesday makes a guest list easier as people would have to take time off work and you’ll find that the more distant friends and relatives will be less keen on that basis

There are loads you can do! We made our own invites, we didn't do party favours but we wrote names of guests on stones we found. A neighbour dropped me to the wedding. A friend took the photos (he was an amateur photographer and so we paid him £150 for 10 poser family photos, which was all we wanted. Guess provided the rest). We couldn't afford more than a glass of wine with dinner and obv champagne for toasts, so we stuck to that. There is prosecco now, which is much cheaper.

We had to be harsh with the guest list. Some of my friends came to watch us get married, then left for the reception and came back for the night time do. It was their suggestion because we couldn't purely afford to feed everyone! I was so grateful to them for offering up that solution and their understanding.

Remember everything attached to weddings has a higher mark up. Look around. A lot of the trimmings are just crap.

Yes, good point.. We are also restricting the plus-ones.

The guest list is a nightmare no mistake. We have 10 more coming than we wanted because no one said " no" and we have 3 plus ones we didn't plan for but couldn't really refuse when asked.
I have a few that refuse to RSVP and just say "I'm trying to come, let you know soon" when asked.
Very annoying if you only have 40 spaces.

Given it's not until April, perhaps think about family who are a "must invite", and get their invites to them soon, if they know they can't make it, they hopefully will decline early so you can free up those spaces for 'B' list/guests to bring a date.

Does the evening reception include DJ? Think about hiring equipment and running a playlist rather than paying a DJ.

Things we did to cut costs:

Limited plus ones to people we actually knew and liked.

Bridesmaid dresses were from an actual high street shop so weren't expensive, they were really party dresses but they liked them and so did I.

Cake was from marks and Spencer's.

My wonderful mum made all our invites and they were lovely, she got pearlised paper and printed them at home, stuck that on pearlised card and glued on a couple of sparkly bits.

I love gerbera Daisy's and it turns out these are really cheap, we had a table decoration, my bouquet, 2 bridesmaids and 3 button holes for £100.

Hair done at a local salon rather than getting them to come to me and I did my own make up.

A friend of mine was studying art and had a good eye for photography so she did all our wedding photos for £200 and we got the lot on a memory stick that I made a photo book out of online.

Best tip I give people about their guest list is to ask yourself, would you ordinarily be happy to buy a meal for this person? If not, evening invite only!

My tip: when you are buying your own outfit do not mention you are the mother of the bride. They will be pressurising you to spend a fortune and lots of drama about how big a deal it is to be dressed to the nines. Just say casually its for a wedding if they ask and buy what you like and can afford. I hate mothers in over the top stuff. Keep it simple.

Yes I'm on a mother of the bride diet and going shopping for this dress on my next day off.

We used Vistaprint for 90% of the stationery, and bits and pieces we only needed one of (table plan, table names, menus) we printed ourselves. Saved us a fortune. You can use Vistaprint designs or even download free ones and add your own names etc.

We didn't have any fresh flowers at all. I bought some foam roses and fake heather from hobbycraft in the sale, along with a 25m roll of sparkly tulle stuff for the church, that came to about £15. I put a tulle bow on the end of each pew and poked a rose and three bits of the heather through the middle of each. I sold them on for £8 afterwards. We had professionally made silk flower bouquets and button holes. Cost similar to real flowers but we wanted to keep them. I have friends who did the same but sold them on and recouped at least 50% of the cost. Other people I know made their own from brooches, buttons, or even fabric flowers from craft shops. My cousin had a brooch bouquet for herself and only gypsophilia for all other flowers and it was lovely and very cheap!

All candles were bought from Ikea in their massive packs. I bought 200 tealights and still have maybe 100? We got married six years ago! We had a friend who ran a wedding business and was extremely kind and did all of our centrepiece and chair covers for free. I will forever be grateful to her.

If someone in your extended family or friends has a fancy car, can you make use of that for a wedding car? Or if they're getting married in the manor too, do you even need one? That saves money!

Don't forget the budget for the ceremony itself. Churches can be more expensive overall but saves the cost of the room fee at the hotel. On the other hand at the hotel you might need to pay the room fee and the registrar fees and that comes to similar. We had a church wedding and saved money by not having the bells rung or the church choir singing.

Do you know anyone in a band who would be willing to do a set at the wedding for 45 mins for the cost of petrol and a meal? Then do a set list yourself from ipod/CD for the rest of the evening. You can even skip the band really.

Another very big cost saving exercise is to have the whole wedding later in the day. Marriage at 4/5pm and a meal at 6 or 7pm means you only have to pay for one lot of food and drink instead of wedding breakfast and evening buffet. We went to a wedding like this recently and it was brilliant. No hanging around for hours at a time, it was all done and dusted in 7 hours and it was brilliant. They got married at 4.30, had photos and then a big roast buffet at 6.30. Speeches at 7.30 followed by cakes and desserts being served buffet style for the rest of the evening whilst we all parties. License for music and alcohol was only until 11.30 so we all went home!it was great!