My Perfect Wedding Under £5000

Well, I keep rattling on about how I had the perfect wedding under £5000; I better share with you how I achieved this. In this article, I outline exactly how.

There’s also an outline of my wedding budget with explanations on how and where we saved money.

The proposal
Firstly, my fiancé Stuart proposed to me in late January 2006.

After doing some calculations on my nifty spreadsheet, we had a little bit more money than we thought. If we were careful over the coming months, we would have £5000 spare which, theoretically we could use for anything. :o)

Like so many other weddings these days, Stuart was under the impression that the wedding of my dreams would be well over £15000.

On the flip side, I believed that you could easily have a cheap wedding under £5000 and have a day that would live up to both our parents expectations.

Luckily by the end of January Stuart proposed and the following day I set about planning my wedding under £5000.

I’m not really a "girly girl", but I still wanted a pretty dress, a lovely reception, the champagne to flow all afternoon and delicious food. However, I was also happy to forego a few things and think creatively to keep my wedding under £5000.

Now, some of you may say that it’s easy to have a wedding under £5000. I agree, it is. You can easily get married for under £1000. But there were certain things that I wanted for my wedding and there were other people to think about too.

Where we started with our cheap wedding
Magazines are great for ideas and inspiration. Although, a touch expensive and not much info on the "how-to". I found it better to use the cast-offs from my bride-to-be friends, saving the cash for other areas of wedding under £5000.

From my first ideas I started to get some rough costs to put into my budget, just to make sure I could achieve a wedding under £5000. I won’t dwell on how to go about starting your wedding budget, as it’s covered in more detail elsewhere in the site.

So what did I want my cheap wedding to look like?
My initial thoughts were very low-key. I don’t wear particularly fancy clothes or jewellery, we don’t have a flashy car and we don’t tend to splurge on things for the house. So doing something a bit more low-key suited us.

Stuart’s parents have a house in a small market town in Herefordshire. It’s very pretty in that part of the world and their house has a large garden with a large, flat lawn. Stuart’s mum also keeps the garden immaculate and in summer there are lots of lovely flowers blooming.

Stuart was also happy for us have the reception there and was happy to go along with my garden party idea. Just one small snag, Stuart's parents requested a sit-down fork buffet for the reception (for the old dears who wouldn’t be able to stand all afternoon and evening). This needed a marquee and obviously tables and chairs. My low-key garden party was becoming slightly more sophisticated.

Enlisting help from friends
The few little extras we now needed to include certainly made us work harder to keep our wedding under £5000. We had to find some freebies.

So Stuart and I sat down and thought about our friend’s talents and how they could help us with our cheap wedding.

Here's where we saved our money:
Sarah and Claire – Photography
Nesh – Chauffeur
Paul – Wedding car
Kelly – Hairdresser
My Mum – Make-up assistant
Rachel – Guest book
Steve – Amp and speakers
Stuart – DJ (all done through our iPod)
David – Toastmaster
Lindsay – Flower arranger
Anne – Cake maker
My mum – Cake decorator
Lindsay, Jane, Stuart and I – Chefs
Anna’s friends – Serving staff
Our extended family and friends - Strawberry pickers, cleaners and assistant chefs.

The marquee
The marquee was erected three days before the wedding, allowing us to set up the tables and decorate it as necessary, without rushing.

All our tables, chairs and the dance floor were provided by the marquee company. They were great. Really helpful, very flexible and extremely professional.

We were thinking simple salads for a summer’s day, with a meat, fish and cheese platter followed by a simple dessert such as meringues or strawberries and cream.

Oh, forgot to mention that there were 100 guests – so no easy task catering for that number!

Drink until your drunk
For our drinks, we went on a booze cruise to France. The prices were incredible and we saved a fortune. We settled on champagne (well a cava at half price in the hypermarket), wine and beer.

The pretty things
On to the pretty things about my wedding under £5000 - the dresses, the flowers and the cake.

I opted for a vintage style, knee length dress from Monsoon. Since it was from the high-street, it was only £225 and fortunately it didn’t need any alterations.

I’m not too keen on the whole bridesmaid dress thing. I think you end up with a couple of girls not feeling entirely comfortable in dresses that they haven’t chosen and that they’ll never wear again. So I decided they could choose their own outfits.

On to the flowers. Stu's mum is also a dab hand at flower arranging and so was happy to do the pedestals for the church, reception and table centrepieces.

Lilies and roses where the order of the day. Simple and beautiful. We used the flowers from the church in the reception. One of the ushers carried them down after the ceremony and we returned them for Sunday Mass.

The table centrepieces were pink peonies in a vase. They made a stunning addition to the table and looked great. We hired the vases from the florist and as the peonies are large, single flowers, they made the centrepieces really cheap – only £2 each.

My bouquet, the bridesmaid’s corsages and the buttonholes were done professionally by the local florist, who kindly also gave us the flowers at cost price.

The cake was a gift from my best friend’s mum, although it was prepared and cooked at my parent’s house. So my mum and dad had a big part in the cake making as well.

My mum iced the cake with help from Mrs Jenkins next door and it was decorated with pink ribbon and fresh flowers on the day. It looked perfect and fitted my low-key wedding to a tea.

The day overall
Besides the fact that I was a little nervous walking up the aisle, the day was perfect. Everything went beautifully. I was 10 minutes late, Stuart said "I do" and I felt relieved.

The reception afterwards was great too. Everyone commented on how perfect the day went, how good the range and quality of food was and what a great, relaxed atmosphere there was. Looking back, we wouldn't have changed a thing.

You can see more of my cheap wedding photos here.


My biggest cheap wedding tips
- You’ve got to be organised. Use Microsoft Excel to keep track of all your activities from where you are with the guest list, who’s RSVP'd to how many bottles of wine you need for all your guests.
- Talk to your parents and get their input in the early stages. This will prevent any surprise additions from them later on.
- Get help from friends – they’ll want to help you and you can’t do everything yourself!
- Keep your budget up to date and if it’s not included on the budget then forget it!
- Plan ahead, think about your timings and provide all key people with a copy of the timeline and details of what they need to do on the run up to the day and on the day.
- Talk to people about your plans – they’ll spot things that you haven’t.
- Brief anyone helping you fully, including all suppliers. They’re not mind readers, so don’t expect them to know! If you don’t tell them, no one will.

A bit about me
For the last 7 years I’ve worked in advertising, more specifically in client services. It’s not all photo shoots, fancy lunches and champagne. In fact, only very occasionally. There are two main focuses of my job:

1.Communicating what the client needs to the creative team and getting the best work out of them.
2.Ensuring the projects that we work on are completed on time and on budget.

Consequently, I have spent a long time motivating people. I have spent years questioning and working with suppliers to make the most of my budget. And finally, I’ve spent even longer with my head in a spreadsheet, fiddling with numbers and timing plans. These things are second nature to me, so planning a cheap wedding under £5000 was no problem at all.

In fact, I enjoyed planning and creating my wedding under £5000 so much that I thought I’d help others do it too. I had seen many of my friends go over their budget and get caught out with suppliers. So I decided to compile this cheap wedding website and hopefully it’s helping you!

If you’ve got any comments, suggestions, tips you’d like to share on Cheap Wedding Success or questions for me, then please contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

My site is listed in the planning section category of the UK Wedding Directory.




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