Real {Budget Friendly} Wedding

This is a wedding I’m sure many of you you’ll be interested in! Rachel contacted me a few days ago to share her lovely wedding and I was so excited to learn that her wedding cost under $5,000!

From the bride:

We believed that for our modest student budget, we could put on a lovely and memorable wedding by being clever, cutting corners in the right places and utilizing the talent of friends and family. We have a devine love of vintage, but we couldn’t afford to have a dress recreated, or a vintage white suit so we went with what we could afford.

Here’s the budget breakdown:

Food:

This is how we saved the most money- we had an afternoon wedding at a wedding venue place. We served refreshments, and appetizers and got married. it cost us about $2800 to do that. We left there, and had a family celebration at my mom’s beautiful house that night and served Mexican food from our favorite restaurant (my grandma’s gift to us) and partied it up until dawn.

Our cupcakes were a wedding gift from my brother in law who is a classically trained chef and my sister in law. They spent all morning baking and did the set up. I told them to focus on taste rather than looks, and we had 3 types of cupcakes, carrot cake (my favorite), chocolate (my husbands favorite) and cherry with peach frosting. They were amazing, and looked lovely.

Photography:

Sasha www.myspace.com/cielitoysashita. She charged us $400 for the entire day. She is my sisters best friend and really gave us a tremendous deal.

Attire:

I found a dress I liked on eBay. It was BCBG brand and I bought it brand new from eBay seller JT and Company. It was $101 with shipping! I figured that everyone said “Its your day, buy the dress of your dreams.” and I thought that if I was going to buy the dress of my dreams, there is no way its going to be some long white dress I am going to wear once, its going to be something I can wear forever! So I found a dress I liked, rather than something that was not practical.

I bought my veil from eBay seller Something Bold for $40. I wore my great grandmothers pearl necklace and my kept my punk rock earrings in. My mom is a hairdresser, and my sister does make up professionally- that was nice! My husband’s tux is from Mens Warehouse – I think it was around $65

Miscellaneous:

See Also

A Dodgers-Inspired ‘Crash Course’ Wedding in Los Angeles

We’re both from California, but in Missouri for school so we had to fly home for the festivities. That was a huge chunk of the budget, costing us around $700.

We packed those in little red take out boxes that were pretty cheap, I cant remember where we got them. If you decide to use this idea, shop around because we found them for about 15 cents each.

Venue:

We got married in a lovely outdoor park setting. We made sure to find a place that didn’t require decorations other than a little bit here and there.

My moms best friend is a Rhodes scholar and a professor, and she had a huge hand in raising me to follow my dreams, and finish school. She married us to vows that I wrote to my husband. A friend of mine loved the vows so much she copied them word for word at her wedding (I was honored!).