Wedding Budgeting from a Personal Perspective: Part 5

Hello everyone. Continuing Vicki's Wedding Budgeting articles, we have the fourth installment where she shares with us more of her experiences as she plans a great wedding and does it while balancing the budget. Don't forget to read the previous articles if you haven't done so already. Enjoy!

Things were moving along smoothly. We'd picked our venue, our cantor, and our date. Now that we had some concrete details down, it was time to send out invitations. People usually spend A LOT of money on invitations. We considered them important, but not so important that we needed flowery, monogramed, bow-tied pieces of art. We needed something that reflected who we were, and that were cheap. We also decided not to do Save the Dates, something trendy that a lot of people are doing these days to let relatives and friends know ahead of time about the wedding. We figured that A) There wasn't enough time between the wedding and our engagement to do them (five months) and B) That word of mouth would spread faster and be more efficient. We turned out to be right and in the process probably saved at least $200.

I decided that we should just get someone to design our invitaitons and that we would print them ourselves because this process might turn out to be cheaper. I turned to Craigslist, which has been a great resource for wedding-related things on sale. Especially good to find on Craigslist are things that have already been in weddings, but that can be reused, such as money boxes, aisle runners, bows and ribbons, and other inane little details that are marked up by ridiculous amounts at craft stores.

I put an ad out that stipulated what we were looking for: we knew we wanted a retro Soviet propaganda-type feel to the ad, but that it also needed to be in both English and Russian (some of our guests don't speak English), and that also we wanted three things: an invitation, an RSVP card (nothing too fancy), and directions. Don't put a million things in your invitation. Ours already ended up costing extra postage because of its weight, and we had to add 5 cent stamps to each. It doesn't seem like a lot when you realize we had 150 invitations to send out. We actually didn't like any of the bids we got on Craigslist so I was feeling hopeless until my friend told me that her friend was a graphic designer just starting out and she could do ours for a discounted rate. Perfect! Vendors looking to build a reputation and friend vendors-two freebie rules in one. She did an excellent job. We paid her $100 for her labor and got the invitations printed at Staples, which cost $200 for everything, including envelopes and stamps. $300 total for something that usually costs $500-$600. For A PIECE OF PAPER. And people really said that our invitations made an impact. Now, the wedding was officially on. A way we could have cut costs, again, would have been to send out less invitations and invite less people. The guests always really add up.

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