One of my favorite parts of the How We Did It wedding stories we run on this site, is when couples share the things that worked out best for their wedding, and the things that were, in short, kind of a waste of time and money. Since much of the wedding industry trades in fear (get a three-tiered wedding cake or regret it forever), these little snippets of real life wedding budget planning can keep you sane. Plus, even though they’re useful tidbits, they’re also delightfully contradictory (one person’s money well spent is another’s wasted). And if there’s one thing I love, it’s a little bit of contradiction in the wedding space, because it just goes to show, there’s no wrong way to do this thing.
Planning my first big event at twenty-three meant that our whole wedding was kind of one big learning curve. Maybe if I’d had the APW book (or the coming-in-January APW Planner), or our How We Did It series at my disposal, I’d have known things like the fact that DIY invitations sometimes cost more than pre-designed ones. Or that if you really like dresses, you should probably make a point of giving yourself a budget for your wedding dress. But, you know, I didn’t. And the wedding still turned out regret free… just… more painful planning than I wish for you.
We understand that not everyone can (or wants to) send us a real wedding, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the opportunity to share all of your hard earned wisdom. So today we thought we’d open up the floor for a mini How We Did It. Tell us:
- What did you spend the most money on for your wedding?
- What did you spend the least on?
- What was totally worth it?
- What was totally not worth it?
If we get enough responses, we’ll pull together our favorites into a future post.
So tell us. What was money well spent at your wedding? What felt a little like you were just setting dollar bills on fire? Twenty-three-year-old mAddie is dying to know.
