A Wedding That Won't Break The Bank

Diana Koch

Jun 9, 20245 min read

As a 2024 bride, I feel like I can speak for a lot of people on this subject...THE WEDDING INDUSTRY IS FUCKING HIGHWAY ROBBERY!

For those who are looking for a traditional wedding these days, getting quotes upwords of $75k is practically the norm, and that's on the lower end. I factually refused to be that statistic. If I am going to be completely honest here, I actually never dreamed of having a huge wedding. I had always imagined myself getting married at the courthouse, but when the day came, I realized how many people genuinely wished to see me walk down the aisle, so the wedding planning began.

I am going to share with you some of my wedding choices that brought down the cost of our wedding tremendously. And when I say tremendously, I mean like, under $30k including everything, right down to the dress.

Some of these ideas might send certain people spirling into a coma, but for my broke bitches, I am here to tell you that there's hope in creating your dream wedding on the cheap!

Tip #1 - Don't Sleep On A City Venue

After some light browsing of wedding venues to see what I was working with, I realized that I most definitely was NOT working with any of them. $25,000 for a room ?! Nothing included ?! Get the fuck out of here! I started to look at some alternatives for wedding venues and I stumbled on the idea of city venues or museums. Both options were half the price. Our theme was Old Florida so we opted for the museum route, and picked The Sample McDougald House in Pompano Beach. If you kept it to under 100 guests or under it was going to cost $5,000. It fit the theme and budget!

While it was a museum and wedding venue, it was still considered a city park. If you look at other places similar, they don't charge and arm and a leg.

Tip #2 - Fuck Florals

I would have rather jumped off a bridge then pay something like $15,000 on wedding flowers that were going to die the next got damn day. What did we do instead ? We went to The Home Depot and went ham on their garden center. As stated previously, our theme was Old Florida so we picked up a bunch on potted tropical foliage (Hawaiian Ti, Araca Palms, Foxtail Ferns, Sword Ferns, Lantanas, and Bromeliads.) For a total of $980 we were able to foliage our wedding the fuck up without nuclear bombing our bank account.

Bonus! We used that foliage to completely re-landscape the front of our house.

Tip #3 - The Dress Gets Ruined Anyway

Now, I'm not here to shit on anyone's parade, and if you really want your princess dress from that fancy bridal dress store, please by all mean, POP OFF QUEEN! Say yes to that dress ! For me though, I had strong feelings about not spending a dumb amount of money on my dress, and I wanted to make sure it was something I could wear again. I wanted to get my monies worth out of it, and I figured it was going to disgusting on the bottom by the end of the night

anyways...Spoiler alert, it was.

I found my dress on Lulu's on final sale/clearance and they just so happened to have the size I needed. My total was $39. What was even better was that when it came in the mail and I was finally able to try it on, it fit like a glove ! The only alterations that were needed was to hem the dress a couple of inches which was of whopping $15 at the flea market.

I did also purchase a pair of shoes with the dress on Lulus.com at the time and they were $52.

Tip #4 - Don't Pay For Paper

In this day and age there's so many online options available, I actually don't even know why anyone would opt for paying to print out save the dates, invitations, ect...

We use Zola.com for almost everything related to paper products. They have this really sick FREE option of creating a wedding website, and you can create your own link to send to all of your guests to capture their address, name spelling, and plus one information. They also had an RSVP link which tracked all of your attendees and declines. Everything digital, and best of all, we didn't spend a dime on it. The only thing we did want to splurge on was wedding thank you cards that we also purchased from Zola.com. That came out to $80 but not untill several weeks after the wedding

Tip #5 - It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know (And Who They Know)

I am talking about vendors people!

It pays to network and find out who in your circle knowns someone, who knows someone with a side hustle, or just a local lesser known party vendor.

Photography: my coworkers brother happened to be a wedding photographer as his passion project side job. 413spi.com is the website and for $2,500 he took our engagement photos, and wedding photos and followed up around for close to 7 hours on the big day. (See collage at the bottom for samples).

Caterer: We reached out to several until we settled on one that was suggested from the venue. They were a local smaller business, but have been around in the community for quite some time. They were a full service catering company, and were able to accomodate a gluten free menu so I would be able to eat freely. Another Perfect Party was the name of the company, and they factually killed it! We 100% expected a gluten free menu to be expensive as fuck, but honestly, it was reasonably priced even with the modifications we added. A total of $18,000 which included seating, tables, bars, buffet, horderves, bartender, servers, and decor.

DJ: We found a small local DJ group on TheKnot.com that was willing to use the playlist that we curated ourselves (uncensored because that's just who we are as people). We didn't have any bells and whistles for this and it totaled to $1,750

We did not have a wedding planner, videographer, or fancy neon wall. What we did have as a nice little extra was the POV App so all of our guests were able to upload their own photos of the wedding to the POV shared album. We spent $40 on this, and each guest had a set amount of photos they were able to take. SO FUCKING WORTH IT!

Tip #6 - Costco (Or Any Warehouse Type Store) Is Your Friend

Ya'll don't sleep on Costco! We needed to provide our own alcohol for the wedding so we caravanned with pick-up trucks and headed to our local Costco. We picked up 9 Kirkland brand liquor bottles (Vodka, Rum, Whiskey), 10 cases of Beer, 60 bottles of Kirkland champagne, and 18 bottles assorted red and white wine. We Spent $860 dollars vs. the thousands we could have spent on an open bar elsewhere, and the best part of all of that was that we were able to return what we didn't use!