A Frugal Wedding – Invitations

Invitations, IMHO, are probably the easiest place to save some money.

I’m going to be honest with you. Most likely, the only person who cares about the invitations is the bride, with the possible exception of the mother of the bride. The rest of us look at the invitation, think ‘isn’t this pretty?’ and then forget all about it.

With the rules of wedding etiquette getting more and more relaxed all the time, there’s no reason to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on engraved invitations with all the tissue paper, insert cards and trimmings unless that’s what you really, really want.

For example, when Mr. and I were quoted between $500-750 from some companies we talked to if we got our invitations engraved by them. Getting them printed vs. engraved was better (at about $200-300), but we were still looking to trim more off.  In the end, we printed the invitations ourselves and spent ~$120 on card stock (including the place cards for the reception) and toner.

There are two things to keep in mind when shopping for invitations. One, the more accessories you want, the more expensive the invitations become. While you probably want a response card, you can probably skip the inner envelope and tissue paper, and those directions can be printed on regular letter weight paper just fine. Two, the more crap you stuff in the envelope, the higher the postage will be. You will probably be spending about $1 per invitation, so remember to factor that into your budget.

If you are willing to skip the most formal invitation traditions, you can easily save quite a bit on your invitations. No one will notice that your lettering is printed instead of engraved, the tissue paper is leftover from when the handwritten ink didn’t dry quickly, and with proper wording address you can skip that inner envelope. The one thing I really suggest you don’t skip is putting return postage on your response card envelope if you use one. Traditionally the recipient would write a formal response on their own stationary and send it off, but now days (if you include a response card) nothing is tackier than forcing someone to pay $.42 to say they aren’t coming to your wedding.

Please note that I’m not going into some of the ‘cheap’ options because they are ‘cheap’ not frugal and some frugal options just aren’t viable for your average urbanite Yes, you can just e-mail all your guests, but that’ is still not socially accepted yet, and is seen by most people as really tacky. Handwriting your invitations on personalized stationary is traditional and frugal, not cheap, but I know very few urbanites who have that kind of time on their hands (or handwriting that neat.)

Image by domaz_dk

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