Your Wedding Day is a very important day in your life. A symbol letting you show the world (well your friends and family at least) how much you love the person you are marrying and telling them that you’re going to be spending the rest of your life with this person. No one really wants to think about budgeting for a wedding, but seriously unless you have very rich parents, if you don’t want to start your married life together in debt then I highly suggest you do indeed set a budget and stick to it! The average wedding in the UK now costs £20,000. Yes that really does say Twenty THOUSAND pounds! Sorry, but to me anyone spending that sort of money on a wedding is either ridiculously rich to start with – in which case they’re probably not in need of reading this article. Or they’re going to be putting themselves into debt that there just isn’t any need for, and we want marriages to work, not start straight away with arguments about how you’re going to pay the bills surely?

Budgeting – What’s REALLY important to you. For most women the dress they wear is pretty important and they don’t want to hire one, but it is an option. And even if you decide that this is an area that you don’t want to scrimp on, DO definitely set a budget for what you’re prepared to spend on that dress, whether it be £100 or £500, and stick to it! Men are generally less bothered about keeping their wedding outfit afterwards, so look at hiring outfits, buying them second-hand, or even try asking on freecycle for them particularly for pageboys outfits for smaller children as these are often grown out of pretty fast and have only been worn once. Think about what is important to you, but be prepared to cut costs on things less important. For example your dress is gorgeous and you’ve spent a fortune on it, but if you can buy a pair of satin slippers from a sari shop for £10 instead of paying £50 for something virtually the same in the wedding dress shop, then do it! No one is going to be looking at your feet anyway!

If you’ve already set up home together, you probably don’t need the traditional sort of wedding gifts of a dinner service and towels etc. so maybe think about making your gift list a little different even if it’s only with close family and friends. How about putting options for them to buy the buttonholes for the wedding, or a scuba diving day out for part of your honeymoon, a voucher for x amount towards your photos. Think outside the box and be different, people will admire you for it, especially when you can say that you didn’t spend a penny on the wedding that you didn’t have.

There are other ways you can think outside the box as well. For example, by all means have a photographer come and do some formal pictures at the wedding, but rather than have them come to the reception to take more, why not leave disposable cameras on the tables so that your guests can take your pictures for you. If your mother in law to be (or any other family member/friend) wants to help but you feel she’s trying to interfere, why not let her do so in a way that’s actually useful to you. You could ask her to have a go at designing you an invitation on the computer to save you the cost of getting it printed, or you could set her in charge of the catering, either with the idea of finding family to help in self catering it, or just in terms of telling her what your budget is for the food and asking her to phone round and order you lots of literature about what’s available. (It will save you time and probably money on phone calls too!). You might ask a couple of your trusted friends to take on decorating the venue for you – it’s much cheaper this way, and will make them feel really involved and special – you could even ask this of them as their wedding gift to you! Wedding fancies come in all sorts of styles and designs and if you feel your wedding won’t be complete without them, why not once again try thinking outside the box and look at something a little different. I have a friend who is getting married very soon, and she ordered most of her wedding favours from ebay, and by having a per head budget and planning ahead carefully she was able to get some lovely pendants and chains for the women without it costing too much at all.

One huge thing you can save money on is booze. I’d always suggest that if you can, you get someone to come in and run a bar where your guests pay for their own drinks. A lot of mobile bar companies will offer this as a ‘free’ service. I.e. as long as they make x amount behind the bar during the night, you don’t pay anything more for their service. Champagne for a toast you can provide yourself and the best way I know of doing this is a trip across to France of Belgium, the prices are substantially cheaper that way particularly if your buying in bulk.

Some of you may be thinking – well it all sounds like it wouldn’t be anything like as special. Well my wedding day was just as special as I could have wanted it to be, and I used a lot of these techniques! We catered it ourselves with help from friends and family (apart from the wedding cake) with a fork buffet at our home for the wedding party and then a finger buffet at the evening do, we asked a friend who had all the equipment to DJ for us and we even had a fantastic honeymoon in Paris so nothing unromantic about it at all. We’ve been married 11 years now, and because we didn’t spend a fortune on ‘getting’ married, we didn’t start our married life in debt and for us that was a really, really important thing.

By Vialdana