How Did We Get Married On The Cheap(ish)?

As I've mentioned, we came in under budget on the wedding. Huzzah!

Astute readers will infer that the marriage did in fact occur. It was awesome, fun, joyful, serene, and several other positive adjectives. I now know who gets all my stuff if I die. Romance in action, folks.

But back to the juicy part: how did we come in under budget? And (what you may actually be wondering), how could someone else, perhaps you, come in under budget on their wedding?

The glib answer is to pick a large number you know you can beat. Instant warm fuzzies.

The less glib answer is that we made a number of unconventional choices that helped us keep our numbers low, while still providing a kick ass time (and open bar) for our nearest and dearest.

1) Set a total budget figure. In order to come in under budget, you need to have a budget. Figure out how much you can, or want to, spend and work backwards from there. We set our number based on how much we could save between getting engaged and the wedding itself while still meeting our other goals. We decided we could save $12k (some of this was converted from previous savings, some was savings between engagement and wedding), but the idea of spending that amount on one day made us feel queasy. On principle, we didn't want to spend twelve grand on a wedding. So we pegged our line item budget to a lower number ($10k, since we're all about oversharing on this blog) with the idea that we had a safety net if, for example, the open bar we really wanted to provide got out of control. We came in just under our line item budget.

2) Create a line-item budget.To figure out our line item budget, my first step was the budget calculator at the knot.com. You have to register to use the calculator, but I found it worth it. Registration is free. A word of caution, don't spend spend a lot of time on the rest of the site, and avoid at all costs the message board, unless you feel like curdling your soul. The nice thing about this calculator is once you put in your overall budget it will automatically apportion that amount among lots of different categories based, I suppose, on "what most people do" and thus to some extent on what is realistic. From there you can delete line items you don't want, can add line items for things not in the baseline, or tweak the percentage of your budget going to each line item. So you don't start from ground zero having to make shit up on your own, but it's extremely easy to personalize your budget.

In our experience, some of the biggest savings came when we deleted line items we didn't want or need. Looking back at our knot.com protobudget, we axed: headpiece/veil, ceremony accessories (I don't even know what that is!), flowers of any sort (we married during winter, nothing is growing here), ceremony musicians, cocktail hour musicians, reception music (all music was DJed by an ipod and our lovingly crafted playlists), videographer, additional prints and videos, limo/car rental, attendant gifts (no attendants), parent gifts (we paid for the wedding ourselves, that was our gift to them), favors, hotel room (a friend pulled some strings and put us up somewhere swanky as his gift to us, otherwise we would have slept at home and had our first licit sex in the bed in which we'd had all that illicit sex), wedding coordinator, guest shuttle/parking. That got us our protobuget. Your list of stuff to chuck will be different, but I encourage you to chuck liberally. Liberal chucking is key. The stuff you chuck is not really that important in the end, I promise. We tweaked from there based on what was more or less important to us, which is how we arrived at our actual line item budget.

3) Don't pay your officiant. There are a number of states that allow what's called self-uniting, which means the parties marry themselves and don't need an officiant at all. Or, if you are getting married in a state that allows it, you can have a friend or family member ordained from someplace like the Universal Life Church. There's a small fee for the ordination, but after that you're home free. Or you could find someone who is already empowered to perform marriages and who is willing to help you out. I have a friend who is a judge and loves performing marriages but who is rarely asked. He offered to give me a 100% discount if we let him perform our ceremony because he likes doing weddings so much.

4) Splurge on stuff only if you'll use again. What, pray tell, is that? That will differ by person, too, but I will go out on a limb and say that if you're only going to use something for one day out of your life, you shouldn't break the bank on it, whereas if you honestly expect to use it into the future maybe it's worth spending a little because your cost per use will plummet. And remember, splurge is a relative term. The stuff we bought ostensibly for the wedding but that is in actuality completely reusable--some of it's already been reused, actually-is: my awesome designer cocktail dress and my fabulous vintage gown; Shiner's dashing suit, shoes, and cufflinks; my wedding day makeup (I did my own, I looked like myself); my lingere, a Bose sound dock for the ipod-provided music; a 12-inch vintage glass cake stand; our paper goods (blank letterhead we used for our invitations, wedding thank yous, normal thank yous, and regular letters and cards, and a decorative marriage certificate that is traditionaly hung in a place of honor in the couple's home). If next year we figured out a cost-per-use for each of these items, I bet the cost of our wedding would be more than $1,000 lower than it was. Apart from the food and drink everything else was borrowed, cannibalized from stuff we already owned, crafted from stuff we already had, bought on big huge discount sale, or found at a thrift store. Even our rings were done on the cheap. Ah, romance. The only thing that can't be used again and was not gotten on the cheap was my hairdo. The exception that proves the rule.

5) Have your reception at a restaurant, bar, or club. You won't have to pay for rentals, and you might not even have to pay to rent the space. Some of the places we first looked at were $4000 just to rent the space, which is more than we paid for food, drinks, and space at our restaurant venue. You'll get good food, not the stuff people only eat because they're stuck with a venue's contractually required caterer, and professional waitstaff that does this as a regular gig not just a couple hours once a week, like most of my friends who have done event catering as an odd job.

Those are my biggest tips, apart from the ones you've probably already heard--offseason, afternoon instead of evening, no alcohol, small guest list, buffet food or passed nosh rather than plated meals, etc. But everyone makes compromises. The things I listed above meant that we could have an open bar and host 60 people, which are not the skinflintiest choices we could have made. You don't have to scrimp deprive yourself on absolutely everything if you decide not to worry yourself or your wallet with stuff that you come to realize doesn't matter to you. Honestly, it's easy for me to see where we could have made different choices and spent more money but I wouldn't have changed anything about our wedding even if I had a printing press kicking out hundred dollar bills in the basement.