Wedding Wednesday//Cutting costs

At the beginning of all of this wedding madness, I set the unofficial goal of staying under $10,000 for wedding planning. This is a crazy number to many. Some have told me it is too much money for a wedding and some say it is nowhere near enough to have a great wedding.

So where did $10,000 come from? After being engaged only 3 months, TheKnot released the findings of a survey that stated the average wedding in 2010 costs $26,000! Out of all the places and people polled, the cheapest wedding was approximately $14,000 in Utah. These numbers don't even represent the cost of a honeymoon either.

I looked at what many brides felt they could not live without. I looked at the things we wanted. Most of all, I did some loosey goosey comparative shopping. I cut out things I did not want, recalculated numbers and felt that I could be comfortable spending $10,000 or less on a wedding. As of last night, we are significantly under budget. Way more so than I originally planned.

I boasted about my frugality on Facebook and Twitter. And so came the questions. Here are the top areas we cut down on our costs:

Invitations and related paper products
I spent around 6 months looking through online portfolios, blog posts, and other suggestions for invitation suites. It was closing in on the beginning of this year and I really wanted to nail down a design so that I could start work on our Save The Date cards. All of the places we contacted wanted roughly $100 for Save The Date cards and another $300 for just the invitation and reply cards. So nearly $400 was the estimate from about 10 different designers. Add in another estimated $100 for postage.

There's where my photoshop skills came in. I made our Save The Dates and our Wedding Invitation suite. We have cut our costs by more than half so far just by designing these ourselves.

Attire
We are going for super simple for our wedding attire. Berkeley knows what he wants to wear and I found a dress that was half of my original budget of $1200.

Decor
We were really lucky in that our venue is beautiful and has wonderful landscaping. We love the old spanish feel of the building and it was part of the reason we chose Tlaquepaque. The landscaping and architecture reduce the need for lots of decorating. Also, since we are doing a cocktail and appetizer reception, we did not need a bunch of tables and therefore we are cutting out centerpiece costs. These decisions have cut approximately $500 from our budget so far.