[ad_1]

Getting married can be ridiculously expensive. But if you do not want to start your married life up to your eyesball in debt then follow these five tips to help keep down the cost of your wedding.

1) Saving money on the venue

Are you desperate to have a spring or summer wedding? If the answer is no then the largest saving you can make is having your wedding during the winter months. The cost of hiring your venue will unduly be cheaper – even more so if you opt for a week day rather than a weekend. Winter weddings can be incredibly romantic. Picture the bride with a white fur wrap and and a winter rose bouquet. If you live in the UK there is no guarantee that the weather in the summer will be good anyway and nothing beats a crisp, clear, sunny winter's day. I got married in January and had the reception at a country house hotel. It was beautiful as by the time we had finished the reception drinks it was getting dark and the reception rooms were lit by real candlelight – truly romantic.

2) Keeping the costs of the reception down

It may be that you want to invite the world and his wife to your wedding but this is where you may have to be a bit ruthless. Try to keep the number of guests to below fifty or sixty (or less if possible) and then invite anyone else you do not want to leave out completely to the evening do.

3) Champagne and wine

Negotiate with the venue about wine and champagne costs. It might work out cheaper to provide your own and pay corkage on it. With so many supermarket half price deals on you can get a fair decent wine for a few pounds and hopefully the corkage will not bump it up too much. Again this is what I did for my wedding. I actually ended up doing a wine run to Calais but at that time the exchange rate was a lot more attractive, so probably best to stick to British supermarkets.

4) The Cake

I made a big saving on my wedding cake by going to good old Marks and Spencer. After being quoted hundreds and hundreds of pounds for cakes a friend suggested I try Marks. I did not even realize they did wedding cakes. They do a range including cup cake ones but I opted for the more traditional kind. They do their cakes in different sizes and they are mix and match. Say if you want a tier cake you just select a small, medium and large cake, choose the color of the icing, then the type of cake – ie fruit, vanilla sponge or chocolate sponge and voila. The cakes are very plain so I suppose, if you know what you're doing you can decorate them yourself or pay someone else to do it. What I did though was to ask my florist to make three small flower arrangements, which were similar to my bouquet, and I just used those as decorations for the cakes. The result was simple, elegant and beautiful. At the time of writing three cake tiers in different sizes costs £ 110 at Marks and Spencer.

5) Photography

This is another area where you can make big savings. It's all very well shelling out for an expensive wedding photographer, but let's face it, in these days of digital cameras it is eminently possible for amateur photographers to take great photos. Another thing to bear in mind is that the trend in wedding photography these days is to take informal shots – particularly where the people in the shot do not even notice it's being taken – rather than ultra posed ones. So why not give two or three of your friends, with decent cameras, the job of 'official' photographers. You're bound to end up with lots of lovely shots and then all you have to do is upload them to one of the sites on the internet that specializes in putting them into a physical book or album form.

[ad_2]

Source by Lisa Dowling