Our Budgeting Plan

Last week I did promise to share how we were making our budget stretch to accommodate both our Disney Cruise wedding & wedding reception in the Hunter Valley.

Anyone who has been involved in our planning knows that’s it has been anything but simple, straightforward and without incident. However during all the planning & changes, we have always kept to our two top priority.

Firstly, ensuring that our family and friends feel special & well looked after. As both our wedding celebrations involve travel & substantial costs to our guests, it is very important to us that they feel special, comfortable, well looked after and have a great time.

Secondly we really wanted a relaxed & memorable day, which felt like us and reflected our personalities.

Planning & Organising Planning has been a big part of keeping control of our costs. The first thing we did was create a specific, detailed budget. This has made it easy when we have needed to reorganise or make changes (big and small) to the plan.

I am, by nature an organised person, but being organised has been invaluable. For example, one of the first things we decided on was our colour theme (pink, green, silver, chocolate) which has worked well as it meant we could take advantage of seasonal (Christmas, mother’s day etc) sales, expo specials and really given us the upper hand when dealing with vendors.

We have also had a long engagement, initially we planned on 12 months but now it has stretched out to almost 24 months. Not only has this given us more time to save, but more importantly it has given us time to research what we wanted, compare prices, and wait for specials before “needing” to book anything. The “need to book” mentality is only starting to appear now we have only 6months to go.

Less is More Both our Disney wedding & home receptions could have had twice or three times as many guests. And while it would have been lovely to have all our extended family, friends, work colleges at our receptions it is just not feasible.

We were also considering a cocktail reception instead of a sit down meal, in the hopes of being able to squeeze more guests in, but decided against this when it didn’t change the maximum guest limit.

Do It Yourself Ahhh DIY, I love DIY and both celebrations will have many DIY aspects to varying degrees. I will create a full list of all our DIY projects shortly, these are just the main ones.

Invitations & stationery (RSVP, enclosure, order of service, menu’s, place cards, escort cards etc) Here is where I have been saving big $$$$$. While craft stores are great you have to be careful not to end up paying a premium for DIY supplies and purchasing items that are basically the completed products. A lot of the DIY invitations kits (for example) don’t really end up that much cheaper than having invitations made for you. An example of a big saving was on pocket envelopes (the folders that our invitations will go into) one supplier I found was selling the pockets or folders for around $2.10 each. To purchase 120 at $2.10 quickly adds up – it was much more economical to buy the sheets of firm card stock paper at 0.60c each and make the pocket envelops myself. Although it took several hours longer it saved me around $180 and that was just the envelopes!

Favors - Don’t want to say too much but these will be ½ DIY

Decorations – We are sourcing our reception decorations ourselves, instead of having a themeing company do it and so far it has saved a fortune.

Flowers – We are very lucky and have a friend who is a florist and together we are going to purchase the flowers and make the bouquets & boutonnieres ourselves.

Transport – Originally we had booked vintage white limos for our Hunter reception and I adored them, however they are by no means a necessity or a must have, more of a "it would be nice". So when the opportunity came up, that another couple wanted the booking for our day, we decided to give them the cars, save the cost, and find something cheaper.

So far, these are just a few ways we have decided to work the budget in our favour, and spend money in the areas and on the details we want, rather than being at the mercy of vendors and paying a premium for services we can do ourselves and with the help of friends and family.