Your Dream Wedding on Your Budget

Ah those first few days of engagement. Dreams abound, full of fairy tale-like settings with dresses of yards of chiffon, satin, and silk, roses and tulips and lilies draping the ground upon which you and your beloved will walk, a horse drawn carriage bringing you to your dream castle. Lots of engaged women, when dreaming of their weddings, dream BIG. At least, until that other B word hits them: BUDGET.

So what to do if your budget is too tight to accommodate all you’ve dreamed of? Start eliminating items from your dream wedding until it fits into your budget, or throw the whole dream out and start again?

Oddly enough, the latter is a much better plan than the former. Eliminating things rom your dream is no fun; creating a new dream, however, can be a wonderful experience. So, if you find yourself unable to decide between the $4000 perfect gown and chateaubriand for 300 guests, don’t worry. Leave them both aside and start over with the basics.

THE BASICS

What are the basic things that a wedding needs, besides a bride and a groom? You need a place to have it, you need guests. You’ll probably need to feed those guests and to keep them entertained at the receptions. And, since you probably want to remember it, you’ll need pictures. That’s basically it.

The traditional breakdown of your budget is 50% for site & catering fees, 10% for photography & videography, 10% for flowers, 10% for music, 10% for stationary, 10% for attire & miscellaneous. But what if you can print all your own invitations, your rabbi provides a ketubah, and your band is your cousin’s college buddies? Obviously, these are just the traditional guidelines and are meant to bend and flex to suit your needs.

First, we have to determine your priorities. Can you think of one thing you absolutely, 100% cannot live without (besides the groom, we hope) for your wedding? That one thing that, without which, all you’ll remember about your wedding is the lack of it? You may not have an item about which you feel quite that passionately (except your groom), but if you do, you want to make sure it’s included. Write down that one thing in your wedding binder. Figure out how much it’s going to cost, and, assuming it’s not more than your whole budget, subtract that amount from your total budget. This way, you’ll know that you’re getting that one all important thing (besides the groom) that will make the day so much more special for you.

Let’s say your one cannot-get-married-without thing was a fairy tale princess gown. You want the whole nine yards: the train, the veil, the layers of satin and silk and lace, the dozens of fittings to get it perfect, everything. You’ve priced it out and it will cost $4000, and your total budget is $30,000. Assume or the moment that you cannot possibly get a better deal on the dress and you absolutely must have this dress or you might as well elope. That’s fine, just subtract that $4000 from your budget. Your budget is now $26,000 and you have your dress. Now from there, we start with the bare necessities and add back in your personalities and dreams.

At this point, determine what your (and your groom’s) priorities are: do you feel it’s more important to have lots and lots of guests, and spend less per person on the food and location? Or perhaps you want to share the day with fewer guests but better food and entertainment? Or maybe you’re content to have defrosted frozen hors d’oeuvres in your parent’s back yard as long as you’ve got a full 12-piece orchestra for 6 whole hours. Either way, decide what’s important to you and your fiancé and work from there. Let’s start with the where.

WHERE

There’s a misconception around that the best way to cut costs on a wedding and reception is to hold it in Mom & Dad’s backyard. The fact is, unless you really want to hold it there, this is not necessarily the best or least expensive option. Odds are your parents’(or friends’ or relatives’) kitchen is not equipped to feed a hundred guests or so. This means your caterer will need to bring in a lot of heavy equipment himself, along with sufficient flatware, dishes, glasses, and stemware; this usually comes with a considerably higher per-person price. Then you have your rental items, such as tables, chairs, table linens (if your caterer doesn’t provide them or if you don’t like the options he provides). You also could need to rent a generator since all that activity might strain the home’s electric system, and you wouldn’t want to risk the power going out during the preparations or celebration itself. Finally, there’s the insurance. The homeowner’s insurance policy might not cover liabilities stemming from an event like this and you don’t want to pay out of pocket if Aunt Molly’s guest trips on his way to the bathroom and breaks a leg. The total of these could end up being considerably higher than finding a wonderful catering hall with an in-house caterer. So, unless you’ve always had your heart set on a wedding at home, you can look elsewhere without budget-related guilt.

If your first priority is having your wedding in a fantastic setting, then there are ways to do it within budget. Think about the ideal place for your wedding: a loft with river views? A mansion on Fifth Avenue ? A castle? A hotel? A synagogue? It’s possible that you may not be able to afford the exact location you’ve always dreamed of, but that’s not a good reason to investigate the possibility. If this is your first priority, then figure out what other corners you need to ct to have it. Maybe it means you can only have 100 of your closest friends and family, or maybe it means buying lots of disposable cameras and asking friends to take pictures instead of a hiring a photographer, or maybe it means having a buffet and only one type of wine at the reception. Unless your dream locale costs 75% or more of your budget, it is possible if you don’t mind a little, or a lot corner cutting.

And what to do if your dream locale really is out of the question? Try to figure out precisely what it was about that space that you loved so much. Maybe with the help of a good florist/decorator or your family and friends, you can transform another, less costly, venue into your dream locale.

WHO

If you must have your 400 nearest and dearest at your nuptials, several locations are automatically ruled out. Lofts, for instance, can rarely hold more than 200, and even that is often stretching the bounds of the fire safety laws. High per-person caterers or double charged per-person sites (i.e. site is $75/person and caterer is $75/per person), can be ruled out as well. This usually includes most hotels, but not all, so it can’t hurt to call and ask if you really love the space.

Let’s go back to those guidelines for a moment. 50% for location and catering fees just might not cut it here; to accommodate that many guests comfortably, you’ll have to reallocate, so figure out other areas you can really cut down, like asking trustworthy friends to take pictures with their own cameras and providing disposables for every table. Make sure you include a note with those cameras saying you want them back and offering to have copies of specific pictures made for guests upon request, otherwise, you might find the only cameras returned are the ones with the lower-quality shots on them. Other ways of cutting corners are having a buffet instead of sit down dinner, and foregoing the elaborate Viennese dessert table for simple plated desserts.

Once you figure out approximately how much you have to spend on catering and site, figure out how much you can spend per-person. Say you’ve managed to allocate 75% of the remaining $26,000 for site and catering. That’s $19,500.00 for 400 guests, or $48.75 per person. This amount means that you will likely have to base your location on the caterer, so start looking for synagogues with in-house caterers or catering halls and see what they can do for you. Bear in mind if you manage to trim your guest list by only 50 people to 350, your per-guest budget goes up to $55.20 per person, and at 300 guests, all the way to $65 per guest. But, if you must have all 400, it is doable.

The Who & The Where are the two biggest budget eaters; after that, everything else is just a matter of reallocating funds from lesser priorities to higher ones.