10 Tips for Saving on Your Wedding

Trying to plan a wedding on a budget? It’s not easy to have the wedding of your dreams on a shoestring, but you can cut corners and still have a memorable day.

Denise Vivaldo, author of Do It for Less! Parties, has a wealth of ideas in her book, Do It for Less! Weddings: How to Create Your Dream Wedding Without Breaking the Bank. And because food takes the lion’s share of a wedding budget, she’s lavished plenty of attention on budget-saving strategies for menu planning, catering, and even doing it yourself.

The founder of Food Fanatics, a full-service catering and media food-styling company, Vivaldo developed her celebration savvy in the trenches: She’s planned and catered more than 10,000 parties, both lavish and humble. Here, she shares her top 10 tips for keeping the costs down at your wedding.

1. Invite only those guests who are essential to you. Keeping your guest count down is the easiest way to ensure a reasonable budget.

2. Schedule your wedding after lunch and end the event before dinner. Your guests will not expect to be served a full meal. Your wedding invitation could read: Wedding ceremony at 2 pm and a reception to immediately follow. Then place a time limit on the reception.

3. Offer a limited menu and bar. Do you want to serve light appetizers with champagne or just cake with coffee? There’s nothing wrong with just serving cake and coffee. How about a fancy coffee bar complete with a barista?

4. Be your own wedding planner. Reserve three hours every Sunday for six months before the big day to place calls, return e-mails, and handle the details.

5. Make your own wedding cake or enlist the help of the best baker you know. Having 100 guests? Baking your own cake can save you hundreds of dollars and take fewer than 10 hours.

6. Beg, borrow, and steal. Decide the adventure or thrill of your wedding is spending as little as possible. Ask your friends and family for help.

7. Have a very organized pot luck reception. Decide on a menu and assign your friends and family a dish or libation that you want them to bring. One idea: What about the best and biggest cheese board ever compiled and French wine at 9 pm? Picnic table, lemon leaves, cheese, knives, cocktail napkins, wine, ice, chilling tub, corkscrew, glasses, candles, and plastic bags for leftovers to be carried away. Done.

8. Get married at sunrise on the beach and take 30 friends out for breakfast at your favorite café nearby. Preorder mimosas, bacon and eggs, and a pancake wedding cake.

9. Rent a dress for the day. It can be anything you want, but rent it, don’t buy it.

10. Get married on a cruise ship or at an island resort or in a different country. Find out what paperwork is vital and necessary for any legality and enjoy your wedding and honeymoon on the same dime.