I’m not going to lie to you. I spent a whopping $99 on my dress (before tailoring) at David’s Bridal. It’s possible to get a decent dress at a decent price, you just need to have a realistic idea of what you can get for your money.

1. Even used designer dresses will cost over $1,000 unless you get amazingly lucky. If you have your heart set on Vera Wang, start looking years ahead of your wedding or make friends with rich brides Try PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com if you just have to have a couture dress.
2. The embellishments make up most of the cost of the dress. You are going to pay out the tuckus for hand-beading or embroidery. If you are addicted to all things shiny, go for a vintage brooch, earring or other item you can pin on instead of paying for a ton of beading or sequin work.
3. Tailoring can cost between $100-500 depending on what needs to get done. Petite brides should avoid embellishments near the hemline which need special tailoring if the dress needs to be shortened. (You see that hem on my dress? That was a $200 hem because of all the crazy layers.) Make sure your tailor is accustomed to working with formal dresses or you may end up paying for even more costly work to fix her mistakes.
4. Sample sales are wonderful… if you’re a size 8-10. Everyone else will need extensive tailoring, which will pretty much negate your savings. If you do buy a sample dress, check that mofo over for damage or stains before purchase because getting a stain out of a wedding dress could cost you nearly $100.
5. Organic silk is fabulous, but sometimes you have to weigh how green your wedding is to how much green you are spending. Man-made materials are cheaper and 99% of the population can’t tell one fabric from another anyway. Console yourself by donating or selling your dress to another bride to reuse and recycle.
6. When you buy your dress has a huge impact on the price. The ‘warehouse’ style bridal salons have big sales in the off-season (which is how I got mine) and if you start looking as soon as the ring hits your finger, you’re more likely to find a sale.
7. Color is very in right now. If you are going to buy a sash or wrap, don’t buy the $50 one in the bridal salon. They are cheaper just about anyplace else, and are ridiculously easy to make if you’re so inclined.
8. There’s always the option of buying a white dress that wasn’t intended as a wedding dress. If you are the kind of bride who wants to keep things simple, this is a great option. The problem is that most of these dressed don’t look like wedding dresses.
9. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of your underthings. Wedding petticoats can get rather expensive if you can’t find one used and you’re probably going to need a specialty bra and panties (not to mention stockings) if you don’t wear a lot of formal gowns.

All this and we still haven’t even started on actual bridal accessories! Just remember that you’re only going to wear this lovely dress once, so don’t go too crazy over it.

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Favors – The pretty little doodads that get left on the table when everyone staggers home at the end of the night.

Like invitations, the only one who really pays attention to the favors is the bride. The rest of us don’t really want an itty bitty picture frame, a rhinestone encrusted coffee scoop, crystal paper weights, a heart shaped coaster, or a plastic shoe filled with candied almonds.

I’ll let you in on a secret, too: You can skip the favors altogether if you want.

That said, most brides do want to have some sort of favors on the table for their guests, or they want to double up and use their favors as placecards (Mr. and I did). But, fortunately, you don’t have to buy expensive yet amazingly useless trinkets if you don’t want to. Here are some frugal favors that your guests will actually like.

Chocolates and other Candies - It’s very hard to go wrong with sweets and you don’t have to break the bank to get fancy ones either. If you love Gummy Bears, use those. Milk Duds? Why not? All you need is pretty packaging (I’ll get to that later) and you’re good to go.

Personalized Bottled Water – Great for summer and outdoor weddings. Hand them out as guests are seated. Buy your bottles in bulk (Aquafina 16.9oz 32 pack for 4.99 anyone?) and print your own labels.

Cookie and a Cookie Cutter – Homemade cookies are the best! If one of your relatives desperately wants to help out, let them do the baking. And don’t buy the cookie cutters from ‘wedding’ websites. Search out places like CookieCutter.com and buy in bulk.

Hopefully you’re noticing a trend: Things you can eat = Good. Things they’ll throw away as soon as they get home = Bad.

And as for packaging, STAY AWAY FROM ‘WEDDING’ SITES. They’ll charge you 100-200% markup just because you’re an excited bride (or groom.) Same thing goes for big name ‘craft’ stores.

Look on eBay or bulk sites for rolls of organza, cellophane bags, boxes, ties, ribbon, tags and other assorted packaging. If you want to get personalized ribbon, do a thorough search because prices vary wildly.

Honestly, the best favors/placecards I saw were apples. Not apple candles, apple paperweights, or apple-scented tea bags. Apples. Granny Smiths to be exact, with the names and seating stuck in the top where the stem would be. Simple, inexpensive and very stylish (not to mention tasty).

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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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Cutting down the guest list is often very important to keeping the cost of the a wedding reasonable, but it’s one of the hardest things to do. The truth is that someone is not going to be happy that they were/were not invited no matter what you do.

The easiest way to keep the guest list down is to set your rules and then stick to them. I recommend no co-workers (unless you happen to work with your best friend) and no family members you haven’t met in person.

People usually understand if you are having a small wedding and aren’t offended when they miss the cutoff. The problems begin when you start making exceptions for other people without making exceptions for everyone. If you decide not to have any kids (because you have to pay for a full plate for them) then you can’t let cousin Suzy bring her kids while telling cousin Eric that his little ones aren’t invited. If you invited your second cousin David from across the country (whom you never met), cousin Margaret (who lives down the street) will be offended if she’s not invited.

Also, don’t feel obligated to send reciprocal wedding invitations. Just because someone invited you to their wedding, doesn’t mean you are obligated to invite them to yours. And while everyone invited to your wedding shower should be invited to your wedding, if the ladies at work throw you a shower too, you aren’t obligated to invite them.

For Mr. and I, the rules were: 1) No one under 16, 2) No one we’ve never met or haven’t spoken to in five years, 3) No one from work unless we were actually their friends and 4) No guest for single invitees. There was no major drama for us on who was/wasn’t invited, which was nice. Then again, we did have an original guestlist of almost 200 (yikes!) which was cut down to just over 100 by the time we were done.

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As you may or may not know, Mr. and I were married this past December. While we did our best to make sensible choices and make compromises where necessary, we still ended up with a fairly expensive wedding. I would like to share what we did right (and wrong) with you to help other young couples maintain some sense of sanity and frugality while planning a wedding.

Mr. and I, growing up in NJ and NY respectively, were used to what is sometimes affectionately known as a ‘Long Island Wedding’.  We’re talking the $50,000-$100,000 extravaganzas that people take out loans for. While I wanted a formal, evening affair, we knew that in the 18 months we had to save, we could never come up with that kind of money (nor were we willing to spend it on a party) but eventually decided on $20,000 as our maximum budget (half of which was coming from our families)

I’m sure some of you from other areas of the country are utterly shocked that I would consider $20k to be a frugal amount for a wedding. I don’t, but it’s the amount that worked for us. I’m sure some people are thinking ‘you could have had a party in your backyard for less than $1,000,’ and they’d be right, but part of being frugal is not going with the cheapest option just because it’s the cheapest. We knew what we wanted, knew we could save up the necessary money, and we have absolutely no regrets about our wedding.

I would recommend setting your budget well before you decide on what kind of wedding you want to have. If you can only save up $2,000 by your wedding, a formal, 200 guest, sit-down reception is probably not in your future. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment by having your heart set on something you can’t afford.

Once you’ve decided on a maximum budget, plan like you’ve only got 75% of that. There are so many silly little expenses that creep in, items that end up slightly over budget, misunderstandings and things that get fouled up that you will end up over budget if you don’t give yourself wiggle room. I recommend using an online budgeting tool like the one over at The Knot to help give you an idea of what the expenses can look like and to help you start to get organized.

Next, decide on what you absolutely refuse to compromise on.  For me, it was getting my hair done professionally and having an open bar. For Mr. it was having a rental bus taking guests to and from the reception so no one drove home drunk in the snow and ice. We planned our wedding around these expenses so there was no gnashing of teeth and wailing because we couldn’t afford what we wanted later.

And, of course, the main thing to remember is that you aren’t going to be able to have a celebrity style wedding. Just get over that now so there’s no drama later. You have a lot of work to do if you’re going to keep your costs down, so keep the dramatics at a minimum and start doing your research.

Coming Soon… The Guestlist

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