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Our wedding was by far the single most expensive purchase of our lives aside from our house. When we got engaged Dave and I were in quite a lot of debt and I was determined that I would have the wedding I had always dreamed of but would not get into a penny of debt over it. Somehow we managed to pay for a £12k wedding through our 15 month engagement with no help from family – although Dave’s parents did pay for our amazing honeymoon!
So where do you start when saving for a wedding? Here’s how we did it:
- Get organised – I had one huge spreadsheet that had everything we needed to buy for the wedding. This was large things like the wedding reception but all the way down to favours and gifts for the bridesmaids. We then put estimates of cost down from research and then a firm cost down when we had a quote for something. We also ticked things off as we paid for them, added when things needed to be paid by and kept a running total of how much money we still had to save to pay for everything.
- Sell anything you can – We used eBay, CEX, Music Magpie and Facebook selling pages to sell as much as possible, having a complete clear out and declutter before the wedding. We didn’t make much money from this but every little helped.
- Review utilities/insurances – We took wedding planning as an opportunity to review all of our household expenses to make them as cheap as possible and save money each month. We used price comparison sites to find the best deal and then went through cash back websites to get cash back on everything too – energy suppliers, home and car insurance and even mobile phone contracts.
- Work extra – Dave and I both worked overtime where possible and also found other sources of income like working as a mystery shopper and completing surveys online.
- Get discounts on wedding purchases – Throughout the wedding planning we tried to get things at a lower cost when possible – buying things in sales, finding discount codes online and getting cash back wherever possible.
- Make money on your savings – Lastly, any money that we did save towards the wedding we put into the highest rate savings accounts that we could find so that we could get a little back in interest too. We also reviewed existing savings and investments to make sure that they were working as hard for us as possible.
Wedding planning is a stressful enough time without worrying about money too. Have a wedding you can afford and it will make planning it a lot less stressful – I loved planning ours but like any couple planning their wedding – I couldn’t wait to go on honeymoon afterwards!
The spreadsheet was like my best friend during our wedding planning! So important to keep a track of it all.
good tips there. I think the biggest thing for us was working out what were the absolute things we wanted, and compromising on other things where we could to lower the cost x