How to Save Money on Your Wedding (9 MONEY HACKS for Couples)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design

Unknown Speaker 0:09
their best lives.

Sharon Tseung 0:14
Hey guys, Sharon from digital nomad quest, and today we’re gonna go over how to save on your wedding. So according to the wedding report website, there are a total of 1.9 million weddings that happened in the US in 2021. And with this, the average wedding cost was around $27,000. So getting married can be really expensive. You have to plan the venue, the food, the drinks, the rings, there’s so many different things to think about. And I was shocked to find that I have friends who spent six figures on their weddings, obviously, where I’m from in the Bay Area, California, weddings are going to be more expensive than the average. But it’s not uncommon for people to really splurge on a special day. And when I was doing my wedding planning, I was shocked to see the numbers, it can add up really quickly. So no judgment if you want to spend more or less on your wedding. That’s up to you. But I’m guessing that if you’re watching this video, you’re probably interested in some money saving hacks for your special day, because according to Wedding Wire, 74% of couples end up going over budget and over half boost their budgets in the course of planning. And in this lending tree study 76% of newlyweds report that they went into debt to pay for their wedding, and that they argued about their wedding related expenses with their partner. So the finances around your wedding can definitely be stressful. I remember watching the show on Netflix is called marriage or mortgage, where people were choosing to have a nice wedding or put that as a down payment on their house. In my opinion, maybe you can figure out a way to have a nice wedding without spending a ton of money and be able to put some money into buying your first home. So that’s why I want to talk about this day. So let’s just get right into it. My first tip is to know your priorities and set goals. So make a list of all the things that you really care about for your wedding. In our case, we use the spreadsheet. So for us what was important was the open bar for our guests, we want to make sure everyone was having a good time I cared about the photos and videos, I wanted to make sure that I did have that memory. Some people spent a lot on photos but didn’t have any footage of the special day I wanted to make sure I had at least both things. I also did want to get my makeup and hair done. But I didn’t want to splurge on that Shawn was actually surprised I didn’t do it myself, but actually cared to have my makeup and my hair last the whole day. So that was something I was okay with spending on but not spending too much on. I also want to make sure we had food obviously, and a DJ and things like that. However, I didn’t really care about floral arrangement, I didn’t spend money on that I only use what was included in the wedding. I did buy a little bouquet for pictures kind of as a prop for the photography. But other than that I didn’t spend on floral, really the venue already included centerpieces for us the venue also included different things where we actually remove certain things like remove the wine and the champagne toast that saved us some money because we didn’t really care about that we didn’t care about sending out physical invitations. So instead of ordering a bunch of those, we decided to use the credit that the venue gave us for other knickknacks. Because for us, we’re only going to have 62 people, we want to just do invitations online. And we even just texted everyone asked, Hey, can you make it to the wedding. So for us, we had outline what were our priorities and what weren’t. And that is gonna save you a lot of money because you don’t have to spend on every single thing. If you think there are a few different things that are going to make your special day really extra special, then spend money on that. But if there are other things that you don’t really care about, like the invitations and things like that, that won’t really be shown on your special day, maybe those aren’t the things that you want to spend money on. So as a tip, make sure you write down the top few things that matter the most to you for your wedding. So you understand how to allocate your money, we were actually aiming for around $10,000 We went a little bit over but $13,000 is not that much that we actually ended up spending as mentioned, 27,000 is the average and in the Bay Area, you can be looking at six figures or more. So that’s why it’s important to also set a budget for the hair and makeup. I didn’t even do a test run I just went and got it done. If you care a lot about it, make sure you do that first but to me, I was like okay, they’ll probably do a decent job and I can let them know if I want to change it. We even just ordered fake flowers to be put on the cake. We didn’t even order real flowers so we didn’t care too much about the floral arrangement. Number two, what can help is selecting an all inclusive venue that has rentals and vendors included. So outsourcing chairs and tables and decorations can be very stressful and cost a lot actually but if you get a package deal you might be able to get things at a discount for us included so many things like the open bar, the DJ, the food, the photo booth sparkler, centerpieces credit that we use for little knickknacks here and there. So it made it so much easier, but also because they have this package, it’s probably cheaper to order with them. So they’re probably doing a special deal with these guys because they’re doing it so often. It also makes things so much easier if we had any changes or accommodations. We could just let that wedding vendor know who will arrange everything else for us. All we had to do was come prepared with the questions that she asked. She asked things like, what color floral Do you want? What type of floral Do you want? What kind of food do you guys want to eat, what kind of music appetizers things like that we did have to make some calls with the vendors that they were working with. But mainly the venue coordinated everything with the vendors. So it was like a lot easier for us having a one stop shop made it a lot less expensive and a lot easier. Number three, if you’re willing to do the work, you can DIY it. So I did mention Yeah, the package, one stop shop type of option, which we did that. But if you are able to do the DIY version, maybe a backyard wedding, you’ll probably save a lot more money. If you did a backyard wedding, you don’t have to pay for the venue you could possibly do like a taco track or order like Chinese banquet style a bunch of food because prices are usually inflated when the word wedding is involved. If you’re ordering food for a party is probably going to be cheaper than saying that you’re ordering food for a wedding, they’re probably going to up charge even more just because that word is in there. So if you’re okay with doing that work, customizing everything and just having it simply in your backyard or wherever you can save a lot of money. This kind of leads into number four. So this is a little hack that I did for your engagement photos, you could potentially book a couple’s mini session. So for me, I just want to pictures with Shawn that were a bit couply I wasn’t thinking about certain location, or like how many photos I needed. I just wanted photos, I could put it on the wedding website or whatever, which by the way, we ended up using Zola and then we put pictures on the website is really easy. So what I did was actually started searching on Facebook for mini sessions and I found couples mini Sessions in Dallas and I hired someone to take photos of us for about $100. However, if you said it was an engagement photo shoot, I’m guessing people will charge upwards to view $100 to $1,000 or more. Again, it’s the same concept like if the word wedding is attached, it’s going to cost more if the word engagement is attached, it’s probably going to cost more. So I just wanted some photos done. I hired someone who took photos of us for maybe 30 minutes or something like that. And we got some nice pictures that we ended up using in our photo book and on our wedding website. But honestly, the really cheap method is just to have a friend hold a nice camera and help you take photos. I’ll go into that tip later though. Now the fifth tip is to compare quotes and shop around now your venue is going to be probably the most expensive thing if it includes the food and the drinks and all that stuff. So you want to make sure you are shopping around and comparing quotes, we could have easily spent double or triple the amount we spent if I decided to go with a different venue. For me, I just wanted a decent venue I didn’t have specifics of what I needed. So I made sure to compare quotes, look at pictures decide what was the most value. So make sure to shop around, they usually charge per person and might have additional fees for the venue and stuff like that. If you’re not doing all inclusive, then you’re probably going to have to shop for every single thing and compare quotes for every single thing. But in the long run, it’s a good idea because you’re gonna save a lot of money doing this. My sixth tip is to consider other dates, weekends are usually going to be the most expensive. So Saturday night is usually going to be really expensive Sunday daytime, probably as well, because most people want to book weekends since Usually people are at work, they want to make sure that their guests are able to attend. Also, if you book on the high season, it’s going to cost so much more. So for us, we decided to book off season so not on the summer months. And we booked a Friday night, we could have saved more if we booked like Monday or Thursday or something like that. But obviously it is more convenient. If it is towards the weekend, Friday night, we figured they’re going to be done with work, they’re going to be able to attend our wedding though a lot of people did have to leave earlier because of the commute to get to the wedding. But the point is booking on specific days that aren’t the most in demand days, as well as booking maybe in March instead of in May could work really well. So we did end of March, it was actually pretty warm, pretty hot, but it wasn’t too hot. And then we’re able to have our ceremony outside and then our reception indoors. Now our venue even had a further discount where if you booked within four months, you would get $500 off which we used to put into other you know nice things like nice chairs, the drapes on the ceilings and things like that, that made our wedding look even nicer. But that meant that we booked it for end of March and we booked it November of the previous year. So we only had four months to get this wedding done. And it turns out it was sufficient time because we didn’t have a ton of things to plan like I didn’t even want to do a first dance because I didn’t want people to watch me and I potentially fall or something or I had to you know think about choreography. I just want to be done after you know I send my vows did the kiss and everything like that and then go eat so like I mentioned the cost of venue can vary significantly depending on the season depending on the date and things like that. So just be mindful of that and decide is it worth it to spend like a few grand more just because of the date like I actually saved $2,000 Just making it a Friday night on end of March instead of doing it in a summer month, Saturday evening instead and I was pretty sure that the wedding was going to be nice whether it was in March. or in May, on a Friday or on a Saturday, I didn’t really care. Seventh tip is setting a limit on your guest list. According to the not the average wedding size was 94 people. But now that we’re getting back to normal after the pandemic, the average is getting close to 110. People, every single person you invite can add up to one to $300 per person. So figure out who you specifically want to invite and see if it would make sense to make it a smaller list of your close friends and family. It was actually really fun for us to have a size of 62 people, I heard from my bridesmaids that a lot of brides actually end up having to run around all the time, they don’t even get to enjoy the event really too much because they’re busy coordinating, whereas like for my bridesmaids, they mentioned that it was the most chill wedding, it felt like they were just attending a wedding with close friends. And just having a good time versus coordinating and doing a lot of stuff for the bride, I was just like, I don’t really care, let’s just have a good time. So having a small made it easier to coordinate. So it’s really chill. So we really spent a lot of time kind of looking at the guest list deciding who we should really invite. So make sure you do that as well. Number eight is to ask your friends and family for help. So don’t be afraid to do this. And it can actually make a huge difference. So for me, I mentioned the engagement photo shoot that I pay like 100 something dollars for because I did a couple of mini photoshoot. But I also did another photo shoot where I just had my brother holding my camera and take photos of us and actually turn out really well. I actually did that for him in the past. So that’s why I was like Can you do that for us too. So I’m glad we kind of were able to do that for each other. It is nice that I have a nicer camera. So I have the Sony a six 500 I also now have the Sony A seven C and I don’t really know too much about camera work. But even though I don’t know that much the pictures end up looking decent for our officiant It was another friend we didn’t want to pay for an efficient which we actually got to remove from the venue costs. It was another part of the all inclusive package that you could have ordered on top of everything. But we decided to remove that from the package. We already had our wedding paperwork done once before. So we didn’t really care. It wasn’t an official thing. So we just needed a friend to just go up there and talk. Another thing was another friend ended up holding the camera to do video for us because he was nice enough to and we ended up sending him a gift as well. And then we asked our other friend to do photos for us. We did pay him for that. But he wasn’t a professional wedding photographer he didn’t even end up editing the photos. So we actually hired someone on Fiverr to help us edit photos afterwards, I hired my video editor to help with editing some video as well. So that helped reduce costs a lot for us as well. So see if any of your friends and family would like to help out in any certain way. And then my last tip is go online shopping. So for me I didn’t care to wear like a really expensive dress that I would never wear again. I just wanted something nice so I literally went on a website bought a dress on sale and it actually looked really good. I even bought a few backup dresses for like if I had to do a first dance or if I had to go dance at night I switched dresses so it was actually a good purchase for me but buying online I only bought it for like 100 something dollars but then I ended up paying more for alterations actually think I spent more on alterations and the actual dresses themselves. So buying online actually saved a lot of costs because I know people who spend like over $5,000 on their dresses another option if you don’t want to go online shopping because I know that it can be worrisome because you didn’t try it on first you can find maybe a local boutique that has like a dress sale going on or there are some websites I think that you can actually rent wedding dresses if you wanted to do that. I know my sister in law actually did that as well. So if you want to just rent something you don’t want to own it. That’s totally fine because I’m never gonna be wearing my wedding dress like ever again. Maybe unless we do like a 1020 year anniversary. I doubt I’m gonna do that so to me it doesn’t matter too much even Sean’s suit we bought it at Zara so it’s like not even a big deal other things like I mentioned the flowers we bought like fake flowers on Amazon put that on her que Bella totally fine. So you know it worked out for the pictures anyway, we bought some table numbers online we bought the wedding welcome sign and the seating chart both on Zazzle and we bought like this little gift box in case people had you know cards or things like that to put in the box and stuff like that. So a lot of the things we just bought online. Alright, so I hope you guys enjoyed my tips on how to save on your wedding after a ton of planning. I think these are some of my best tips and we managed to spend only $13,000 versus spending like six figures on a Bay Area wedding you could probably again like I mentioned save a lot more if you did a backyard wedding or even a loped and didn’t really care about doing a fancy party or stuff like that. And like I mentioned, really shopped around shopping around saved us so much money. We’re even going to do an overseas wedding initially but because of the pandemic we decided to go local where it’s easier for a lot of our friends and family to come naturally. Overseas weddings can be pretty cheap if you did it in Bali and stuff like that. That’s actually where we initially were looking but finding you know venues that are all inclusive made a lot easier where we actually didn’t spend that much anyway.

Unknown Speaker 15:03
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