Clark's Big Book of Bargains (22 page)

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* WEDDINGS *

A wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it carries a once-in-a-lifetime price tag. The average wedding in the United States costs about $20,000—so much money that a lot of couples are choosing instead to elope.

One of the hottest trends in the wedding industry is to combine the wedding and honeymoon. My nephew and his bride did this. They got married—and had their honeymoon—in Belize. This started in Las Vegas, the wedding capital of the United States, and now resort communities in the Caribbean, Hawaii, and elsewhere are doing a huge business in combo wedding/honeymoons. You can have family come along and attend the ceremony, then go home. Or you can have a private ceremony, then hold a party back home after the honeymoon is over. If you’re having a private ceremony, the resort may include the wedding for a few hundred dollars more than the cost of your stay, or less. It could be as little as $50. So you can save nearly all the cost of the wedding, thousands of dollars.

If you want a more traditional wedding, the first thing to decide is how much you can afford to spend. If your parents are paying, ask them what they’re willing to spend. And check on what the groom’s family might be willing to contribute. If you’re paying for your own wedding, check your savings or figure out how much you could save by the wedding date, and figure out a bottom-line amount.

Some couples start the opposite way, by looking at reception sites, wedding dresses, and musicians, and have no idea how much it will all add up to. If you don’t budget an amount first, you’ll get totally mixed up.

Wedding Web sites such as www.the knot.com will show you all of the potential expenses of a wedding. Once you have a bottom-line number, you can figure out how much of the total to spend on each major component. To do that, you’ll have to decide your priorities. You might want to spend the money for a live band, while your fiancé might want to invite 200 of his closest friends. Since most catering facilities will charge you by the person, deciding how many people to invite will have a greater impact on the cost of the wedding than anything else. If you and your partner have widely different goals, someone is going to have to compromise.

Theknot.com has a budgeting tool that will help you turn your bottom-line figure into a detailed budget. You tell it how much you want to spend on the wedding and how much you plan to spend on a few components, and it will tell you how much you have left to spend on other parts of the wedding. Then you can make adjustments.

The reception is the most expensive component, and your budget will help you decide what kind of reception to have. A sit-down dinner, for example, would be a lot more expensive than a brunch or a dessert/champagne reception. You could spend $300 a person for a very fancy sit-down dinner, which for 100 people would be $30,000—just for the meal.

You’ll also have to consider the cost of entertainment, the wedding dress, flowers, invitations, limousines, alcohol, and photography.

There are lots of ways to save on the cost of a wedding. As I note in the section on parties, you can save tons of money on a wedding by having it on a Tuesday or Thursday night instead of a Saturday. If that’s too extreme, get married on a Friday or Sunday. A lot of people are doing that. Just keep in mind that if you’re going to have a lot of out-of-town guests, they might not be able to make it in for a mid-week wedding. Or you could save by having your wedding in January instead of June, which is one of the most popular months for weddings. If you avoid the most popular months, you may have more negotiating power.

Christa DiBiase, the executive producer of my radio show and our in-house expert on weddings, knows all the tricks. At her wedding, for example, she spent a lot less on alcohol than most people, yet still had a full bar. She did that by buying the alcohol herself at a discount store and bringing it to the reception. Photography was very important to Christa, so she spent more on that, but she didn’t spend a lot on her dress. She brought in her own caterer, and saved money there.

The bride wants everything to be perfect on her wedding day, but that doesn’t mean she can’t have that beautiful wedding on a budget. If you look at all the great ideas in wedding magazines and books, you can duplicate almost anything on a budget. Perhaps you have a friend who is a talented artist. As her wedding gift to you, she could make the flower arrangements, so you won’t have to spend a fortune paying a florist.

Here are some other ways to save:

Bridal Magazines

Because most women buy up to twenty bridal magazines to scour for ideas and tips, the cost can really add up. You can get all that information for free by visiting your local library. You won’t want a pile of magazines or expensive coffee-table bridal books after you’re married, so why pay for them? Christa saw a book at her library by the famed wedding designer Colin Cowie, and others by Martha Stewart and Vera Wang. Also, ask friends who were married recently if they still have their books and magazines. After Christa got married, she tied a bow around all of her bridal magazines and gave them to a friend who was getting married.

Dresses

If you really want the fairy-tale dress but don’t want to spend a fortune, consider renting a dress, borrowing one, or buying a used dress at a consignment store. If you go to “sample sales” and buy a dress off the rack, you can get a designer dress for half its regular price. One of Christa’s friends cut out pictures of designer dresses she liked, bought the fabric at a fabric outlet, and hired a seamstress to make a copy. It cost her a total of $300 to get a fabulous custom-made dress. A department store is another place to look. They have a lot of great off-the-rack dresses. For some reason with wedding dresses, the simpler and more elegant the dress is, the more it costs. Dresses with a lot of lace and beading don’t cost as much. If you buy at a fancy wedding shop, don’t customize the dress too much (for example, ask for a different style of sleeves) or you’ll pay a lot more.

A few times a year, I get a phone call from a distressed bride-to-be, or often from her mother, about a problem with a wedding dress. Rachel was one such caller. Her daughter’s wedding was in one week, and the dress wasn’t in the store yet. They had been promised that it would arrive a month before the wedding. The bridal store kept giving her empty promises, and she wanted some help.

This is precisely why I hate custom-ordered wedding dresses. I’ve had calls about stores that went out of business overnight, leaving brides stranded without dresses, veils, and bridesmaids’ dresses. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. In Rachel’s case, there was a solution.

She had purchased the dress using a credit card fifty-eight days before she called me. She had two more days to put the dress into dispute on her credit card. If the store couldn’t deliver the dress on time, then at least she would be able to get her money back. But her daughter had her heart set on that particular dress, and since the sample dress had fit her in the store, she bought that dress, and the store gave her a discount. The store also agreed to have the dress professionally cleaned, rush the alterations, and do them at no additional charge.

Flowers

A friend of Christa’s had her mother do the flowers, using a Martha Stewart book as a guide. The end result was spectacular. Even if you use a florist, you can save. Before Christa chose her florist, she asked first if she could buy the bowls in which to display them. The florist would have charged $24 a bowl. Christa bought them for $1 each at the discount store Garden Ridge.

Invitations

As I say in the section on parties, you can print your own invitations with a laser printer, and they look just as good as engraved invitations and cost a lot less. Print them onto blank invitation paper you can buy at a party store.

Limousines

If you haven’t priced a limousine in a while, you’ll be shocked at the cost: about $80 an hour for a six-passenger stretch limo. If you want the limo mainly for the photos, rent one for an hour, or if there’s a minimum, for the shortest time that’s allowed. You can have the limo take you from the wedding to the reception and have pictures taken of you getting into and out of it. But you don’t need it to pick you up after the reception, or shuttle you around before the wedding. You can ask a friend with a nice car to do that. Limousine companies frequently go out of business, so don’t pay any money in advance unless you use a credit card, and make the deposit within 60 days of the date you’ll need the limo (so you can do a chargeback if the company disappears).

Another alternative is to rent a really nice car and drive yourself. You can rent a luxury car for a day at any of the car rental companies and it will cost you less than renting a limo for one hour. When I checked for a weekend in Chicago, you could rent a luxury car for $54.99 from Avis, and $59.99 from Budget and National. A Lincoln Town Car is one of the most popular choices for this.

The Reception

You can save the cost of a catering hall by holding the reception at your home or someone else’s home. Sometimes people who met at college will hold the reception on campus. Or check to see if you can rent a museum or other public facility for your wedding.

If you’re on a very tight budget, you could have a very small, elegant reception, and after your honeymoon invite everyone over for a big backyard barbecue. So you have the huge party but spend a lot less money than if you had a huge sit-down dinner. Some people have the reception at the church. There’s no facility charge for that.

You can save a lot if you hold the reception at a place that will let you bring in your own caterer and alcohol. Some catering halls charge a minimal fee for the space, then gouge you on the food and drink. The catering hall Christa rented for her wedding charged $1,500 for the space and let her bring in her own caterer and alcohol. A fancy hall might charge $4,000 for the space, and require you to use their caterer and alcohol.

You can save by choosing what time of day you have the wedding. If you have a morning wedding, you can have a brunch with champagne, or you can have a luncheon, or a mid-afternoon wedding with appetizers only. Or you can do a late-night wedding with dessert. The most expensive choice by far is the 5:30
P.M.
wedding with a full-course meal and a band. That’s when you have to spend the big bucks.

Entertainment

Do you want a disc jockey or a live band? There’s a huge difference in price. You can have a DJ for a few hundred dollars, while a band will cost thousands. A well-known, top-flight band could cost $5,000 to $10,000 or more. Christa wanted a band, but that was something she compromised on for her wedding. She wanted other things more. Christa had a DJ for the event, but she snuck some live music in by hiring a piano major from a nearby college to play at a cocktail reception before the wedding. He wore a tuxedo and played for two hours, and it cost Christa just $100. A college near you might have a student jazz ensemble that will perform for much less money than a professional band.

Photography

Photographs help you remember your wedding day, so good ones are important. I get calls all the time from newlyweds whose photographer didn’t show up at the wedding, took bad pictures, went out of business, or simply ran off and never delivered the pictures. The only way to protect yourself from that kind of disaster is to have some kind of backup. A lot of people put disposable cameras on every table and ask their guests to take pictures and leave the cameras for the bride and groom to have developed. You can buy them in bulk for maybe $5 each. Ask your friends who like to take pictures to shoot certain things, such as the wedding vows or the best man’s toast. Christa’s father took the photos for her aunt’s wedding, and her aunt still hasn’t forgiven him, thirty years later, because all the pictures are blurry or have his thumb in them. There is not a single decent photo of the entire event. Always have backup.

Christa got the photographer to give her the proofs of photos she didn’t choose, and all the negatives. That’s a huge money saver, because if you have the negatives you won’t have to pay for fancy laboratory reprints. You can get the fancy photographer’s album, at a cost of $600 or $700, or you can get the photographer’s proofs, make reprints yourself, and create your own album. But don’t skimp too much on pictures. Make sure you have a photographer who knows what they’re doing.

The same is true for videography. Make sure you have someone who knows what they’re doing, and have a backup. If you’d like some video but don’t want the cost of a videographer, ask a relative with a good video camera to shoot the wedding for you.

Most people love having a wedding video in which their friends are interviewed and there is video of the actual wedding. But some people find the presence of the videographer too intrusive.

Once you get the video, remove the erasure-protection tabs so you don’t accidentally tape over your wedding video. And make a copy.

The average wedding video costs $1,000, according to
Bridal Bargains,
by Denise and Alan Fields, but can vary from as little as $300 for a one-camera, unedited video if you live in a small town. However, a sophisticated, highly edited, multi-camera “wedding movie” could cost $2,000 to $5,000, according to the Fields book.

When you choose what kind of wedding to have, think about what really matters to you. Are you going to remember what vases the flowers were in, or are you going to want really good pictures to keep? Is a video of the wedding or a live band more important? You can save money on every aspect of the wedding. Spend the money on the things you really want. Save it on everything else.

You can find more ideas in books such as
Bridal Bargains,
at theknot.com, or on online message boards.

Planning

Time is your ally in planning a wed- ding. Christa planned hers in about ten months—the average probably is a year. If you want to get married sooner, it might cost you more.