Losing Sleep Over the Budget- Anxiety- Ridden bride :(

[Carley]

Do not worry,  I myself do this as well. Like said before, prioritize what is most important and what you can perhaps do without (or make and bring yourself to your resort). I am saving money by doing silk flowers. I am ordering them from a seller on ebay (I can PM you the seller if you would like to look at her colors, bouquets, arrangements). They are soooooo reasonable and can be customized to your color and liking!! I went with silk flowers for the simple fact that they are cheaper, my bridesmaids can save their bouquets, I can save my centerpieces, and the heat in Mexico won't wilt the flowers so they will still look great for pictures! I am also ordering chair sashes from an ebay seller for roughly $1 a sash (you can also go to a craft store and probably buy the material cheaper and make the sashes yourself). So when I go to my resort, I am bringing my centerpieces, my flower bouquets, my chair sashes (saving a ton of money)! With regards to dresses, try looking at davidsbridal.com . Under sale dresses, they have dresses as cheap as $70 U.S. dollars and the dresses are beautiful! The bridesmaids dresses are also very cheap and range all the way down to under $50! Finally, with regards to my photographer, it is cheaper for me to fly my photographer down to my resort than book a photographer from down there. I am getting married in Mexico and the photographers seem to be very expensive. Flying my photographer down means I get all-day coverage and then will choose another day to get back in my dress and have TTD pictures done (all for one price verse paying for each additional hour of photography and a separate price for the TTD). Just a few ideas to think of! Feel free to PM me Best of luck!

[Carley]

Oops, I think I posted to you instead of on this thread. If that happened, please let me know so I can repost correctly!
 

[Carley]

Well, my post never appeared at all so let me try again. I am having my wedding in Mexico and I too worry about price all the time. Try to prioritize what is most important! There are many things you can do on your own to cut cost. I am doing silk flowers. I am ordering them from an eBay seller. If you pm me I can send you the link. I get to customize my colors and arrangement, for very very cheap! The reason I chose silk is so my bridesmaids can save their bouquets, I can use my centerpieces at my AHR, and the heat in Mexico won't wilt the flowers so they will look good in pictures even hours later! As for decorations I am also ordering chair sashes from eBay for roughly $1 a sash. You can probably go to a craft store and buy the material and DIY cheaper. I will also use the sashes for my AHR. So flying with me to my resort will be all my flowers, centerpieces, and sashes. As for dresses check davidsbridal.com . They have wedding dresses as cheap as $79 and bridesmaid dresses under $50. And the dresses are beautiful! With regards to photographer, I am flying a local photographer down. It is much cheaper than paying for a photographer from Mexico. By flying mine down I am getting all day coverage and a separate day for TTD for one price, as opposed to booking a photographer down there and paying per hour and for Ttd separately. Good luck and feel free to PM me for any more info :-)

[Mufin1785]

Make your money go further look into DIY projects.  Capital One 360 is an Online saving account the has .75% interest which is really great right now I think they add $25 to yur account just for signning-up.  We are using this account to save for our house. 

[Jenny2014]

Originally Posted by Dazeydawl 

 

I'm in the same boat as well. I'm two months out and the money factor is really starting to get be stressed. Me and my fiancé also don't make crazy amounts of money, we do make more than we need at the moment but once kids and a house come I know we will be living pay cheque to pay cheque. We have cut back on ALOT in our daily lives for the past year and somehow managed to save quite a big of money but I'm still terrified to spend it and keeping charging things to my credit card until i know what our final costs are.

 

As for the wedding costs we did splurge on photography is this is the most important thing for us and so we are flying someone with us. But we are cutting out a DJ and just using our iPod. We also cut out flowers for the ceremony, so no arch or anything. I have DIY'd my heart out and if I find anything on etsy or in stores I like I try to figure out how to make it first. I'm bringing down the majority of my centrepieces including lanterns, ikea has a 45 day return policy so assuming they make the trip ok I might be returning them after (does this make me a bad person? What else am I gonna do with 5 lanterns lol unless the florist buys them off of me).

 

I'm sure you will be fine. You still have a long way to go and lots of time to save. I would sit down and also look over all your bills and credit crd and bank statements and really itemize where you spend money and where you can cut back like date nights, if you have full cable or satellite look at cutting some channels out to save money, do the same with cell phones. Come summer maybe hold a garage sale and clear out some stuff you never use anymore! There's lots of ways to get creative. Instead of picking up a second job as it is tiring there's other ways of making some extra cash, if you know anyone with small kids my offer to babysit?

 

Anyways I'm dragging on I'm sorry!

 

Living pay cheque to pay cheque is the norm, I know, but it makes it really challenging, especially when you do know your costs are just going to keep going up!

 

I know we will be splurging on photography as well. I think regardless of whether you do your wedding locally or away, photography seems to cost about the same.

 

I plan on DIY the crap out of my wedding. Especially since the resort just sent me the price list for additional decorations. HA! Makes me a bit sad I can't have the real actual flower I want. But holy crap, $150-$180/us for a dozen stems of blue orchids. NO WAY. I will buy up a crap load of fake ones for $50, thank you very much. I will be making all my decorations/invites/programs/ etc myself as well. This website has inspired me to do all that!

 

We did cut back what we could on our cable/internet. We already have the most basic packages we can handle. My cell phone is my life, so I can't bring it down too much further than it already is. I am planning on going through our apartment and selling a bunch of stuff we don't use/need. We have two tube TV's just taking up a ton of space in our spare bedroom. Thinking of selling those on kijiji for 25 a piece/ 40 for both, just to get them the heck out of there. And I have all of this teaching stuff that I won't ever use since I can't get a job teaching here.

[Jenny2014]

Originally Posted by Billandstina 

 

I know for me having an excel spread sheet where we put every wedding penny spent on it has really helped keep us together and made us realize the truly important things (like photographer) and the extra stuff we don't need (which can add up really quickly if you don't pay attention). Also look for sales!! My FI laughs at me but I very literally don't think I've paid full price for anything big or small for this wedding...so secretly I think he's happy I look for coupons and sales! Lol

 

Oh excel is my friend! I will be using it to track out spending, that's for sure. I use spreadsheets galore at work right now, so I know how easy it makes life having everything set up properly.

 

Once we figure out our budget, I will be able to start tracking our spending. As of right now, we don't have any costs for the wedding, so that will starting coming out very soon!

 

Sales will be my friend too! Though that is how we live our life- we do our grocery shopping based on the store that has the best deals, not necessarily the one with the best produce/meat, etc.

[Jenny2014]

Originally Posted by Carley 

 

Oops, I think I posted to you instead of on this thread. If that happened, please let me know so I can repost correctly!

 

 

I don't know where your post went??? It's not in here, and I didn't get a PM either..... haha lost in cyber space!

[Jenny2014]

Originally Posted by Mufin1785 

 

Make your money go further look into DIY projects.  Capital One 360 is an Online saving account the has .75% interest which is really great right now I think they add $25 to yur account just for signning-up.  We are using this account to save for our house. 

 

Yup, I will be doing a ton of DIY

 

We don't have Capital One here However, all of our money we are putting into a Tax- free- Savings Account, and we get interest monthly on it.FI has one and I will be opening one as well, so we can both get the interest added into the accounts.

[Mufin1785]

Well good luck!  Months before my wedding I had nightmares that when I showed up in Punta Cana that they had no record of our deposits so there was no wedding.  It is natural to have anxiety it will pass in due time.  And you have plenty of time to plan the and stress will be well worth it when you are having your dream wedding in paradise.

[Melissa14]

Originally Posted by Jenny2014 

 

 

I know, thank you! I know it is still so far away so worrying about it now is unnecessary. But heck, we've already been engaged almost 6 months now with barely anything saved. Okay, yes, granted, we bought a car because mine died on me as I was driving it (piece of ), so that took a big chunk of our savings for the initial payments and the insurance going up. And the extra $300 I had allotted for putting away for the wedding is now being paid in a car payment and more expensive insurance, so I think that is where a lot of my stress is really coming from. I know it was a completely necessary expense, but now we are only putting away $200/month, and that gets us absolutely no where towards where we need to be for this wedding. Things will change, hopefully new/improved jobs will bring an increase in pay. We'll see how things work themselves out!

You are not alone. My income was not getting the job done either. When we started saving we were almost at a thousand and I had to take $600 out because I had an emergency I needed it for and I cried about it for days. Then, in January my fiance had to get a new car and that's another $500 that he can't save per month for our wedding. For a long time we were each putting $250 direct deposit into our savings account and it was adding up but then we had to start paying vendors all their deposits so the balance is always so low it stresses me OUT! Luckily, my boss realized that either she gave me a good raise or I was gone. I got a raise and I'm hoping this will help ease the stress. My fiance has been applying for side jobs and we are both saving as much as we can. It takes some effort but it will all be worth it and be okay in the end. Long story short YOU ARE NOT ALONE.