Did you know that the average wedding in the US costs $27,000? That’s actually more than one year at the very expensive Christian university I attend. And I can’t afford to go there. This whole wedding planning thing will be oh so fun.
So, how do I go about tackling this business? I started by registering for all the best wedding websites out there. They have planning pages, and galleries of gowns, and bunches of bouquets, and all the dresses they have listed are designer. Which means they cost on average this: $$$, and more often this: $$$$. What exactly those dollar signs mean, I don’t know. All I know is that they scare me a little bit. Because I’m pretty sure my entire budget consists of this: $. Oh this will be fun.
So when I realized that these wedding websites are catering either to the wealthy socialite princesses who have billionaire Daddies willing to cater to their every whim, or the normal middle-class ladies who have no apparent problem with taking on loans rivaling that of our national debt, I decided that this may not be the best place for me to get all my ideas.
So I started looking at what their ideas were, and stumbled across this article titled “The $10K Wedding Budget Challenge.” Here, the discussed how they challenged wedding planners in different places across the country to plan beautiful weddings on only ten thousand dollars. While I found some of the things listed here somewhat useful, I found two main problems with this idea. One, the cost of hiring a wedding planner to plan the entire shebang costs upwards of $40,000 (four times as much as the actual budget for these weddings…). Second, $10K is still not small enough to reflect my budget. Now, I am confident that I can plan my wedding on my budget, and that it will still be gorgeous, but I don’t quite know where to begin! It seems to me that any vendor prefers to cater to heiresses. I can’t imagine why no one would be interested in someone like me, hoping for big savings, not looking to shell out millions.
Man, I should go into the wedding planning business. I’d be rich!
So, how do I go about tackling this business? I started by registering for all the best wedding websites out there. They have planning pages, and galleries of gowns, and bunches of bouquets, and all the dresses they have listed are designer. Which means they cost on average this: $$$, and more often this: $$$$. What exactly those dollar signs mean, I don’t know. All I know is that they scare me a little bit. Because I’m pretty sure my entire budget consists of this: $. Oh this will be fun.
So when I realized that these wedding websites are catering either to the wealthy socialite princesses who have billionaire Daddies willing to cater to their every whim, or the normal middle-class ladies who have no apparent problem with taking on loans rivaling that of our national debt, I decided that this may not be the best place for me to get all my ideas.
So I started looking at what their ideas were, and stumbled across this article titled “The $10K Wedding Budget Challenge.” Here, the discussed how they challenged wedding planners in different places across the country to plan beautiful weddings on only ten thousand dollars. While I found some of the things listed here somewhat useful, I found two main problems with this idea. One, the cost of hiring a wedding planner to plan the entire shebang costs upwards of $40,000 (four times as much as the actual budget for these weddings…). Second, $10K is still not small enough to reflect my budget. Now, I am confident that I can plan my wedding on my budget, and that it will still be gorgeous, but I don’t quite know where to begin! It seems to me that any vendor prefers to cater to heiresses. I can’t imagine why no one would be interested in someone like me, hoping for big savings, not looking to shell out millions.
Man, I should go into the wedding planning business. I’d be rich!
You can do a lovely wedding for pretty cheap. I'm going to email you with a price breakdown of what I did to cut costs, since I did it fairly recently. :)
Try not to stress about it; this is the fun part!
p.s. I realized that my email turned out to be more advice/ideas rather than price breakdowns, but you'll get the idea. Also, I apologize for its longwindedness.
offbeatbride.com they are all about cheap weddings. its pretty punk, but still full of good ideas.