Love Online Coupons?

I know that I've talked about Groupon before on this blog but I don’t think I’ve mentioned One Spout, a site that basically collects all those Groupon-like online coupons into one place.

This site offers a bunch of different sorting options, including by distance and category, though you can’t sort by newest first, which is kind of odd.

That one flaw aside, this can be a great site for a bride-to-be.  It lets you declutter your inbox while still letting you catch a great deal, like over 50% everything from flowers to photos to wedding cakes. There’s even deals on wedding show tickets.

One deal that caught my eye was this one from TakeItAndGo.com that, for $89, gets you an at-home spa party for you and three friends. The really nice thing about this deal is that you can buy an unlimited amount so in theory, you could buy three of these coupons and have a twelve person bachelorette where everyone gets a mini- massage, pedicure and manicure (if you’re interested, the deal’s still on for four more hours).

One Spout isn’t just a Toronto thing; it has sites for most major North America cities as well as areas like “Halton region” and “Niagara region”, so this a great site for brides all across the continent.

Getting Married In Toronto Might Be Getting Pricier

It might soon cost a bit more to get married in Toronto. City council has proposed raising the cost of a city marriage license up to $140, from $130. Not a big jump but still, something to take note of it.

Also something to note: You don’t need a Toronto marriage license to get married in Toronto. A marriage license from any city/town/whatever in Ontario will do and yes, marriage license costs do vary by municipality . Of course, before you plan a road trip, crunch the numbers and make sure it’s worth your while to go out of your way to get a cheaper license.

Also possibly going up is the price to get married in one of Toronto’s four civic centres (this includes City Hall), from $75 to $100, and the cost of photo permits for city parks. Pricing here varies by the park but page 46 of this lengthy document gives you an idea of how the numbers are changing.

Spent Vs. Saved

So as promised in yesterday’s entries, here are five areas where we’re glad we spent the cash and five areas where we’re glad we saved.

Spent

The venue – As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the Berkeley Church isn’t cheap but it was exactly what Shawn and I wanted and we received tons of compliments on the venue as well as the food. The staff was always friendly and while we had some communication snags with our initial planner, the planner who replaced her, Kathy, was quite helpful.

Open bar – No question, an open bar was the way to go. It certainly helped to get people up on the dancefloor, speaking of which…

DJ – So my original plan was to go with DJ iPod, an idea that Shawn shot down and I have no problems saying that I’m glad he did. We ended up getting a great DJ who closely followed our playlist while adding in his own touches at just the right moment.

At-home hair & make-up – I think being able to get ready in the comfort of my own home, and not have to worry about rushing to and from somewhere, really helped to make the wedding day more relaxing.

Hotel room – This is one of those areas that I initially thought was a waste of money but the truth is, being able to head to a hotel after the wedding was a nice treat, as was the swim we got to take the following morning. We stayed at the Thompson Hotel and its lovely rooftop pool totally made up for the alarm clock that went off at 6 in the morning and the scent-heavy detergent used on the bedding (and no, I’m not one of those anti-scent people).


Saved

The dress – Technically this is an area where my parents saved but whatever. My dress, which I quite liked (I’ll post a picture at some point) was quite reasonable for a wedding dress of its style. All in, including alternations, the veil, fancy dress bag and taxes, the dress cost under $1,500 which while not cheap, is a good deal considering its size and the amount of detailing it had.

The wine – Our wine was $11.95 a bottle and personally, I thought it tasted just fine, as did many other people. As any wine expert will tell you, the cost of a bottle of wine has nothing to do with its quality so don’t feel like you need to spend big bucks on your dinner wine.

Décor – We cheaped out big time here. All our décor, including our centrepieces and the few flowers we used for the head table/ceremony and the escort card table came to maybe $500. And some of that we’re getting back because I’m selling what I can on the bridal boards (actually, I should probably post that stuff on here too). While we certainly could have spent more here, I don’t think we really had to. The inside of the Berkeley is quite pretty with its stain glass and fireplaces. Plus it helps that the Berkeley includes coloured up-lighting and dozens of tea lights all over the place.

The flowers – The flowers we got were beautiful; Picasso lilies are now my new favourite; but we didn’t have a lot of them and in the end, I think that was fine. Our cake was actually supposed to be decorated with fresh flowers but for whatever reason the florist forgot to bring those so the cake went flowerless. At first I was a bit annoyed but then, as I thought about it, I was OK with what had happened because I realized that I no longer had to pay $35 for something that would be used for a few hours and then thrown out.

Transportation – We didn’t pay for any special transportation and while fitting my big dress in the back of our SUV was a bit awkward, it was certainly preferable to paying some obscene amount for some tacky vehicle.

How Our Wedding Budget Worked Out In The End

Money and our wedding budget has been a regular topic on this blog so now that it’s all done, I might as well give you a summary of how we did numbers-wise.

We were actually under the new budget though over the original one. The original number we were trying to work with was $20,000 but earlier this year we scrapped that and replaced it with a budget of $25,000. In the end we spend just over $23,000.

Now that last number doesn’t include all of our costs, just what Shawn and I paid for. Some items, like my dress and our live musicians, were paid for by my parents while Shawn’s family contributed some money towards our bar costs. Factoring in everything, we probably spent just under $27,000 which, for a downtown Toronto wedding with an open bar, isn’t crazy.

We could of though brought that number down a bit by making these two big changes:

1. The venue – We loved the Berkeley Church but it wasn’t cheap. In all, we spent about $15,000 there and while Shawn and I both agree it was well worth it, we definitely could have saved some money by using another venue.
   
   
2. Having an open bar – Again, this is something we wouldn’t have changed but if we had, we have saved ourselves well over $1000 (assuming of course we still paid for the dinner wine).

Tomorrow I’ll post an entry that looks at five areas where we’re happy we spent the money and five where we’re glad we saved it.

Here's One Way To Raise Money For Your Wedding

Well, here’s one way to pay for your wedding: Collect a ton of aluminium cans. A couple in Spokane are paying for their July 31 wedding with the proceeds from the 400,000 cans that they’ve turned in for recycling.

So just how much did they make? $3,800. OK, so that’s not a ton of money and collecting the cans turned into a bit of a community effort but still, it’s a cute story.

The couple also have a website if you want to find out a bit more about them and how they are keeping their wedding costs down.

If you wanted to do this in Ontario I guess you’d want to collect alcohol bottles. I must admit that there have been a few times where, upon seeing the large pile of bottles sitting in my building’s recycling room, I have thought about bagging them up and taking them over to the Beer Store for the deposits.

The Berkeley & Budget

While making Monday’s post, I noticed that I had a blog comment waiting for moderation. It was from someone named Natasha and she was asking some great questions about the Berkeley. I approved the comment and then went to answer it but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I’m going to paraphrase Natasha’s questions here and answer them now.

Natasha is interested in having her wedding at the Berkeley but she has a budget of $20,000. She was wondering if the Berkeley would do a cocktail-style reception and if that would cut her costs.

The Berkeley certainly will do a cocktail-style reception but I don’t know exactly how much that would drop the cost. I know we tried playing around with our food costs and things didn’t budge as much as we would have thought though we are having a sit down dinner so that does make things a little different. I think the Berkeley does have a minimum food cost (at least for weddings) and if you want to use them you need to meet it.

That being said, I think Natasha should figure out what she’s comfortable paying for her venue/food costs, present that figure to the Berkeley and see what can be done.

As we experienced first hand, doing a wedding at that venue for $20,000 is tough but it could be done and here’s some tips on how that could happen:

• Have it on a Friday
• Have a cash bar
• Have your wedding cake double as the dessert
• Get a reasonably priced dress
• Have the wedding night at home
• No limos
• No DJ/live music
• Get hair and makeup done/paid for as a gift
• Simple DIY invites
• Simple everything else
• Follows some of the advice mentioned on these sites

The good thing about the Berkeley is that it doesn’t need much in terms of décor and its florist, Jennifer from Flower Girls, is great at working with small budgets. So I wouldn’t worry about the flower budget.

The photo budget on the other hand, well, maybe Natasha has a friend who’s a photographer.

In all honestly, I think Natasha could pull off her wedding at the Berkeley if she could get the venue at about $13,000 or less. I don’t know if the Berkeley would go for that number but as the saying goes, it never hurts to ask.

Custom M&Ms & Promo Codes

By the time you’re reading this, I will have just gotten back from my trip to New York City.
One of the things I was originally planning on picking up while I was there were some customized M&Ms to use as our favours.

The reason why I was going to pick them up in NY is because Times Square is home to a big M&M store and I was thinking that by picking them up there, I could avoid having to pay for shipping. Sadly, you can’t get personalized M&Ms at M&M stores, you have to buy then online. Sort of annoying…

Thankfully, through the magic of Google, I was able to find some promo codes that at least make buying these things a little cheaper. I did a test order with the Thanks15 code and it totally worked but I think I’d save more with the free shipping code so I’m going to try that when we go to make our actual order.

Hopefully a few of you will find those codes and the site they live on, RetailMeNot.com, useful. While that site definitely caters to Americans, you can find the odd promo code that can save us Canadians some cash when we’re doing our online shopping.

Big Worry #1: Money

In my last post I mentioned that I have a couple of big wedding-related worries. The first one has to do with money.

I would say that this is a fairly common worry for any bride who’s neither wealthy nor from a wealthy family. However, it hadn’t really been a concern for me until a week or so ago, when Shawn and I sat down and looked over our wedding finances.

I should mention that Shawn and I are covering most of the wedding costs ourselves. My parents are covering certain areas such as my dress and Shawn’s side is covering part of the liquor cost but we’re covering everything else.

We had started off on the right path, with a good overall budget and what I thought were reasonable area-specific budgets. While we did go over in some areas, it certainly wasn’t because we were being frivolous. Shawn still gets on my case about our photographer being $300 over budget but finding a good Toronto photographer who will shot at least six hours for $1500 is damn hard.

It turns out that I under-budgeted certain areas and so a few months ago we bumped our $20,000 budget to $25,000. At the time, this seemed like a reasonable, doable number.

Now, after our more recent financial review, I think that number's still doable but it’s going to be tight and there’s no room for anymore wedding-related spending. This is because while our budget went up, our savings didn’t and so now we have a bit of gap that I’m understandingly worried about.

As I’ve said numerous times throughout this blog, I think it’s silly to go into debt for a wedding and while I don’t mind putting stuff on a credit card, that card should always be paid off in full. My goal is that come September, our wedding is paid off in full and the only way for that to happen is to start saving hardcore.

Still, even the idea of having all the needed funds sitting in a bank account doesn’t completely end my worries. I know this will sound odd but I wish we could just pay in full as many wedding-related bills as we could right now. I know that’s also a stupid idea but not having to worry about those outstanding bills would certainly relax me.

So that’s big worry number one. Tomorrow I’ll go over big worry number two.

Ring Picked, Cake Still A Mystery

This is how wedding planning goes: one step ahead, two steps back.

The step ahead came yesterday when the quote came in for my wedding ring. Because of how my engagement ring is designed, I can’t wear a regular wedding band (well, not without it looking weird) so I needed a custom one. A few weeks ago, Shawn and I headed over to Made You Look, a Parkdale jewellery shop that has a great reputation for creating high quality stuff. After a bit of back and forth and quick meeting last Sunday with a ring designer, we got our number and it fits within our budget so that’s good.

My ring is being designed by Jilian Maddin and so far she’s been great to work with. While Made You Look certainly isn’t the cheapest spot in town to get a custom ring made, they are reasonable and the end result is great so if you’re looking for custom jewellery I recommend them (the store also stocks all kinds of beautiful, sparkly things and its smaller sister shop located across the street offers lots of fun, and cheaper, pieces).

The steps back are the result of the stupid wedding cake. I should start by explaining that our wedding cake will be doubling as our dessert and I want it to be one of the best cakes that my guests have ever tasted.

Cakes, and desserts in general, are important to me and I really, really want this thing to be one of the highlights of my wedding. But I also want something that’s in my budget and that looks nice. So I got a few quotes, ate a few samples and then decided that really, my best bet would be to get a couple of amazing mousse cakes from Patisserie D’Or in Oakville.

This place makes cakes that you think about for days after and even though our cake likely wouldn’t look like a tradition tiered wedding cake (you’re not supposed to stack mouse cakes), it would taste so good that no one would care what it looked like. And this place is totally within my budget. Sadly, it’s closed for month, starting mid-July and continuing into August. So no wedding cake from there.

I do have a back-up bakery (no, not Dufflets; getting a custom design pushes the price above our budget and I don’t like their wedding cakes enough to make that splurge) and while they make great cakes, I wouldn’t say they make cakes that you dream about. I have emailed a couple of other places to see what they charge and hopefully we can get this cake business wrapped up soon.

Wedding Flower Links (Including My Toronto Florists Shortlist)

Here are a handful of flower-related links that you might find useful:

• Big Wedding Tiny Budget: The DIY-section of this site is must-read if you’re thinking of saving some cash by doing your flowers self (end verdict: you’ll save money but you might also drive yourself insane so keep it simple)
• Bride.ca: See what flowers are available in which season and then read a ton of other articles
• Bronze Budget Brides: Lots of useful posts on how to keep your flower costs down; includes links to online flowers shop and even a few how-to videos
• The Knot’s Flower Guide: OK, so it’s a bit overwhelming but there are a lot of good ideas on here and you can search by colour
• Sierra Flower Finder: It's like a dictionary for flowers

And here are links for a few Toronto florists who I thought looked interesting:

• Cool, Green and Shady: Located on Queen East; has been featured on Rich Bride, Poor Bride
• King West Flowers: Located at King and Bathurst; offers tons of choices and bouquets start at just $40
• Pink Twig: Located on College near Crawford; offers lots of fresh, contemporary designs
• Jackie O: Located on College near Bathurst; has a standard package for $950 that includes 10 centrepieces
• Costco: Several locations; Costco is must-checkout if you’re doing the flowers yourself. Most shops also offers simple arrangements

Wedding Insurance

When it comes to most brides’ wedding to-do list, getting wedding insurance is usually pretty low on the list, if not absent all together. But should disaster strike, damn, they are going to wish they’d gone ahead and gotten at least some insurance.

I know that wedding insurance is very unglamorous topic. It’s also a bit of a negative one that evokes images of runaway brides and cold-feet grooms. But really, don’t you want to protect the thousands of dollars you’re spending on an event where so many things could go wrong?

Shawn and I got insurance not because we’re worried that one of us is going to flake out but because photographers can have bad days, cakes can fall apart, venues can fall down and either of us can be hit by a car that doesn’t stop at a red light while speeding down Dundas.

Our wedding insurance policy was bought through our home insurance and is running us just over $200. For that price, the cost of our photographer, cake and outfits are totally covered. There’s also several thousand to cover gifts and honeymoon cancellation. Our venue is covered for up to $10,000 meaning that if we call things off the day before the wedding we’ll still be out a few thousand but we feel safe taking that gamble.

And that’s the nice thing about insurance policies, you can decide how much you want to “gamble”. We could have insured out entire wedding but that would have cost us somewhere around $500, an amount we weren’t ready to spend. So instead we settled on getting most of it covered for a lower price.

Your current home/rental/car insurance provider is generally the best place to start looking for specific information on wedding insurance since many companies will offer a preferred rate to those who already hold an existing policy. Of course, if you’ve got the time, do shop around, particularly if you want a really customized policy (say, only want the venue covered for $10,000 but want your $15,000 dress totally covered).

While buying wedding insurance will be, to some, wasted money, for me it’s a clear case of “better safe than sorry”.

Where Not To Under Budget

Below are five areas where you may be tempted to under budget (we certainly did!) along with a minimum budget amount.

Now true, you might be able to get these things for cheaper than the amounts listed below but then again, maybe not. So err on the side of ending up with extra cash and over budget even on those categories where you think you’ll be able to get an amazing deal.

1. Flowers - $500 should be enough to cover a wedding party of eight, two or three head table arrangements and, if you go with simple flowers and are willing to do a bit of the work yourself, a few corsages/boutonnières. If you’re using live flowers in your centrepieces, budget $30 a centrepiece though obviously you’re not getting orchids for that amount.


2. Invites - $3 an invite can be done as long as you’re willing to DIY and aren’t interested in blinged-out invites. This cost does include two regular stamps (so make sure your invites are regular side).


3. Rings – $2,000 for both rings means neither of you is getting anything too sparkly but at the same time, there is enough cash there to get you both something nice that you can hopefully live with for the rest of your lives.


4. Cake - $4 a piece is the going rate for a fairly simple cake. Yummy Dufflet cakes are available for this price so you can certainly get quality cakes at this budget point.


5. Officiate - $200 is a safe number to work with though non-religious officiate can run more.

And don’t forget to budget for…

• Your wedding license ($130)
• Attendant gifts (at least $50 per person)
• Dress alterations ($200 is a safe number to work with)
• Tips (10-15% of whatever the bill is)
• Wedding insurance (more on that later)

Yeah, We're Blowing Our Budget

Back in March, I proudly declared that our wedding budget would be $20,000 (not including alcohol and my dress, two areas where we’re receiving parental assistance). Well, it looks like we’re going to have to push that number up to $25,000.

Though we’re certainly going to aim to be as close to our original budget as possible, there’s no way we’re going to come in under or even right at $20,000. While it looks like we’re saving a bit of money on our centrepieces, we’re over on our photographer and I have a very strong feeling that we are going to be over on our cake, florist and officiate. We also decided to hire a DJ, something we didn’t originally budget for at all and that’s playing a big role in busting our original number.

All of this has made me wonder if maybe we should have gone with a $25,000 budget from the start. However, I worry that if we’d started with $25,000, would we be looking at a $30,000 budget now?

So here’s my new budget philosophy: look at your income, your lifestyle, your debts, your spending habits, your wedding expectations, location and potential guest list and come up with a realistic number that’s also a bit on the low end. Tell yourself that that’s the number you are going to aim for and then do your best to meet (or be under) that figure.

At the same time, create a contingency fund of 10-15 percent (the lower your original budget, the higher the contingency fund). Make sure that this is “real” money that you will have access to in case you need but only spend it if you really need it, for example, your dream photographer turns out to be $1000 than you budget or, like us, everything is turning out to be another $100-$200 more than you thought it would be.

I think the areas that we were hoping to cheap out on are areas where a lot of couples hope to save some cash. I’ll take a closer look at these areas in the next blog post.

Wedding Invites

Back in May, I wrote about how I’d found my ideal invites at Michael’s. They were cheap, the colours were appropriate and they looked good enough.

Well now, a few months later, I’ve changed my mind on the whole invites-from-Michael’s thing. Yeah, they were cheap but they were also a bit boring and predictable. While I agree that it doesn’t make sense to spent a ton on stationary, I do think it’s okay to spend a bit to get something that suits your wedding and that, hopefully, makes people excited for it.

There is some truth behind the saying that the invite sets the tone for the invite. If you get a big, elaborate invite, you’re likely going to assume that the wedding will be a big, elaborate one. But if you get a plain, generic invite, well, you’re likely going to assume that the wedding will also be on the plain and generic side and no bride wants her guests to make that assumption about her wedding.

My mom has been sending invites to me that she and her friends have been getting and they almost all look the same. I’m all for simple but come on, there’s tons of ways to do “simple” that doesn’t involve black ink on heavy, plain white paper (and no, gluing a coloured ribbon doesn’t really personalize the invite).

Over the past few weeks I have seriously looked a hundreds of wedding invite designs, most in the low-to-mid-price range. There are lots of affordable options out there, including plenty of print-your-own styles so there’s really no excuse for boring invites.

In my next entry, I’ll highlight some of my favourite designs/designers that I came across on Etsy. But first, an invite “reality check”:

• Throw the idea of a 1$ invite; stamps along run over $1
  
• To keep it cheap, keep it simple: no pockets, no flaps, no ribbons, no jewels, no double-lined envelopes. Instead spend your money on an eye-catching, appropriate design
  
• Going with a postcard-style RSVP card is generally cheaper than a card and envelope combo (though trickier to print if you’re doing DIY printing)
  
• I’m going to dedicate a separate entry to DIY printing but for now remember that DIY printing doesn’t equal free; you still need to pay for paper and ink
  
• And before you get too attached to a DIY design, make sure you have whatever computer program is needed to print it (I’m amazed at the number of brides on bridal boards who don’t have Word so they can’t print many DIY templates)
  
• Sometimes it’s just plain worth it to spend the extra cash. For example, get your return address printed on your envelopes/RSVP postcards. Yeah, this can cost extra but it’s one of those things that’s worth the cost

How To Save $200 A Month

Really, you can do it.

1. Restrict both of you to one night out a week = at least $50
2. Live to learn with the basic cable package = at least $30
3. And while you’re in that mindspace, examine your phone and internet bills; even lowering those by $10 helps = $10
4. Discover that most drugstore products are just as good, if not better than MAC, Clinique and other pricy brands = $50
5. You know what, just don’t go into Sephora (or your Store of temptation), just learn to walk on by it = at least $50
6. Stop buying candy, pop and coffee = $20 (added bonus: weight loss)
7. Start clipping coupons with the help of the web = oh, let’s be modest with $20 (though you could save a lot more)
8. And stop buying items such as DVDs, books and video games that you’ll only ever pay attention to once = $25
9. Drive the speed limit, on properly inflated tires = $5 (or more)
10. Don’t drive? Then make sure you always have tokens in your bag = $5
11. Learn how to give yourself at-home manicures and pedicures = $25
12. Going out to buy a specific item? Then bring just enough cash to cover it = well, it really depends what store you’re headed to

Look at that, we’re easily over $200. Okay, so not all of these numbers apply to you and yeah, they are only estimates but at least this gives you the sense that yes, you can, with minimal pain, save $2,400 a year.

Of course, for many weddings $2,400 is enough to cover the flowers and maybe the favours so yeah, we’ll definitely be returning to this topic in the near feature.

Don't Fall Into This Trap...

In my last post I mentioned how, if you’re having a $25,000 wedding and you have a year to plan for it, it you need to put aside about $2,000 a month to make sure that your wedding is a debt-free process. So how are you going to do that?

Well, in all honesty, you’re probably not going to be able to save that all of that amount and you likely will have a bit of wedding debt that, hopefully, you can pay off using the money that people give you as a gift. But don’t fall for the common belief that a wedding can pay for itself; this idea has trapped more than a few brides into years of debt.

Instead, count on between 10-20 percent of your wedding budget being reimbursed by your guests. What figure you go with depends on your wedding budget and your guest list. If your wedding is running you $25,000 and you’re inviting just over a 100 people who are, for the most part, gainfully employed, you’re probably safe to go with 20 percent.

But if you’re throwing some kind of lavish event and/or your guests have been hard hit by the recession (or maybe you’re throwing the sixth wedding they’ve been to this year), lower that figure to 10 percent.

Whatever you do, don’t do math like this:
100 guests X $200 = $20,000, meaning you only have to come up with $5,000

I know it’s tempting to imagine this scenario (or even better, one where you come out ahead) but don’t do it. If you do, you could find yourself in a nice, little debt-hole after you count up the checks and discover that those 100 guests were mostly couples/families who mostly gave stuff/best wishes/a group gift of an overpriced vacuum that you’ll never use.

So now that you’ve figured out how much you can allow as debt, how do you make up the difference?

Where To Start Saving

After the emotional turmoil that a wedding can create, the financial aspect of wedding planning is probably the most stressful. Thankfully, there is an easy way to start saving for your big day: set up a tax-free high-interest savings account.

Why set one of these up? Well, for one thing, creating a separate “wedding” account makes it easier to track your wedding spending and saving. Using a tax-free, high-interest account will make your money work harder for you (before interest rates dropped dramatically last year, my high-interest account made me hundreds of extra dollars) and provide you with a tax-shelter on the first $5,000 saved. And, using a saving account makes it a bit harder for you to access your money, a feature that any shopaholics/impulse spenders are going to want to take note of.

Shawn and I use an ING account because it’s free, easy-to-use and comes with a number of useful calculator tools. But most major Canadian banks offer some kind of tax-free, high-interest accounts. Just make sure to do your research before you open one up because some accounts require a minimum balance and charge a monthly fee, two features you are going to want to avoid.

One feature however, that you’re going to want is automatic transfers. ING calls this their “Automatic Savings Program” and it lets us move a fixed amount of money from our regular checking account over to our ING account on a regular basis. You can choose weekly, bi-weekly or monthly options and the amount being moved can easily be changed.

Setting this feature up makes saving significantly easier and less painful than manually moving the money over. And, because it’s being moved over into its own account, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”.

So how much should you be regularly be saving? Well, let say you’ve budgeted $25,000 for your wedding, you have a year to save for it and you’re starting with an initial savings of $1,000. You’re going to want to put away $2,000 a month to meet your goal and not go into debt (the interest you earn will give you a $400 safety cushion, based a three percent interest rate).

Yeah, that’s a lot. We’ll talk a bit about how you can reach that number over future entries.

Looking For A Cheap Dress?

Okay, maybe not a “cheap” dress but a very reasonably priced one? Then check out the “for sale” board on any wedding forum. I just recently started poking around on these boards on the Canadian Bride and the Wedding Bells forums and wow, there are some amazing deals on there.

For example, here’s a $3000 Alfred Sung dress that’s selling for $500 and that price is negotiable.

Or how about a never-altered Maggie Sottero Gloria dress, normally $1600 but selling for $900?

Now, I know some people aren’t comfortable with the idea of wearing a used dress or worse, a dress that never made it to the alter because the engagement broke off, but quite a few of the dresses for sale have never been worn and are up for sale because the bride bought a second dress (their craziness, your gain I guess). These are perfectly good dresses ready for you to take them to the seamstress of your choice for alterations.

And so what if the dress was already worn once? So long as it’s in good condition and you love it, I don’t see what the big deal is. Besides, you don’t have to tell people where you got it from. Just say that it was a private sale, direct from a woman who didn’t need it (which is completely the truth).

If you need to, or just want to, trim a few hundred dollars from your budget, buying a dress second-hand is certainly the way to go.

Credit Cards Can Be Your Friends

There’s nothing wrong with paying for your wedding expenses with a credit card – as long as you pay that card off in full at the end of the month.

There’s actually a lot of pluses for paying with a credit card: it’s quick, convenient, the preferred choice of many vendors and a great way to rack up bonus points such as Aeroplan miles.

But then are also some pretty big downsides, debt for example.

Thankfully, it’s easy to avoid debt: simply never put anything on you credit card until you have until cash in your bank account to cover that particular item. Then, as soon as the charge appears on your credit card statement, pay it off. This way your never incur any interest or late penalties.

Of course, the downside to this method is that you have to already have the money to cover the expense. This isn’t really a big deal if your purchase in question is a $100 pair of shoes but if the purchase is say, your $3200 venue deposit, this situation is a bit trickier.

Still, if you’re really having a common sense wedding, you should have saved up that cash first. This doesn’t mean that you have to have your entire budget in the bank first before you announce your date; it just means that you need to stay ahead of all your expenses and have to cover them as they come up. So if your venue is costing you $12,000, you don’t need that $12,000 in your account on the day you sign your contract with the venue, you just need enough to cover the deposit and then enough to cover each subsequent payment.

If family is contributing to your wedding fund, sit down with the contributors and find out exactly how much is being given, in what form and when so that you don’t end up carrying a bunch of expenses on your credit card while waiting for the funds.

While your parents giving you $5,000 is extremely generous, getting that cash somewhat early in the planning process is much more useful than getting it on the day of your wedding, after most of the bills have been paid. Alternatively, they could put that $5,000 directly towards one of your bigger costs, catering for example.

Everyone Wants A $10,000 Wedding

It must be “plan-your-$10,000 wedding” week. On Saturday, the Star ran a piece on how to have a green wedding on ten grand. Then on Monday, theknot.com’s weekly email contained a link to its “$10,000 challenge”.

That article profiles five under-$10,000 weddings that took place in five different American cities. While the pieces have some interesting, though rather city-specific, ideas, it feels rather hypocritical to be reading about budget weddings on a website that’s packed with images of elaborate, six-tier cakes and dresses that cost more than $10,000.

A better source for cheap wedding ideas are 2000dollarwedding.com and APracticalWedding.com. While 2000dollarwedding.com is bit too homey and DIY for my taste, it might be right for you it if you’re crafty and don’t dream of the Big White Day. The author also answers readers’ questions and provides plenty of detail on how she was able to pull off a $2,000 wedding.

APracticalWedding.com is more my thing. The author takes a very common-sense approach to planning a wedding and doesn’t make you feel guilty for spending money or not going the DIY route. She also profiles other practical weddings and links to over a dozen wedding-related blogs including one called a $10,000 wedding.