lonely and desperate

Your wedding day is the one day where you can easily get carried away. And I don’t mean by the groom. It is easy to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, and that is money that you could have spent on a house or paying off your school loans. The wedding industry is worth billions of dollars, and offers anything and everything a bride could want. But you don’t need to break the bank to have a fantastic wedding day.

Size Counts

The first thing you do when planning your wedding is to start making the list. After your immediate friends and family, you keep going. You can’t help yourself. After about ten pages you’re trying to remember the name of the girl who sat next to you in third grade. By this stage, it isn’t even that you particularly want to invite her. Or even remember her. But you’ve listed people that she knows, and you would hate for her to feel insulted.

Trimming the guest list is the best and first place to start when you are operating within a budget. If you don’t invite everyone that you know, don’t worry. They won’t be insulted. Most people will realize that you are watching your expenses and will wish you the best. They may even be happy to not be included. A wedding is a big expense for the guests too. They have to pay for presents, formal clothes, and babysitters. And if one of your distant friends, relatives or acquaintances do feel insulted or snubbed, they will get over it. Either that, or you’re probably better off without them anyway.

Think Discount

Don’t pay top dollar. You can often save a lot of money by looking at discount alternatives. You may find a wedding dress and your other formal clothing available at reduced prices at a discount store. Every woman dreams of being able to walk into an expensive boutique to to be treated like royalty and draped in layers of white silks, satins, and laces. But unless you have the budget of royalty, this dream is going to have to stay just that.

If you are careful, you can still find a dress that makes you look and feel like a princess, but without having to pay such a hefty price. When you save so much money on purchasing your dress, you can pay to have it altered or tailored to your needs. And the money that you’ve saved can be spent on more important things. You can keep the discount theme going when it comes to shoes, hair, makeup, flowers, and everything else on your list. Let other people pay retail.

Green is the New Black

By thinking green, you can also cut down on your expenses. Although the world of organic veggies and recycled materials is often more expensive just because they are popular, reclaimed or up-cycled items may be just the thing to keep your white wedding in the black. Your dress, for example, may be sitting in the attic of one of your friends or family members, waiting for the chance to be worn a second time. Particularly in cases where the current owner has had more than one wedding, there is a good chance that she will be happy to pass it on. There’s a pretty good chance that they won’t even have any emotional attachment to the dress either. At least, not a good one. An old dress can be refashioned by a good tailor for a minimal investment, and made to look like it was designed with you in mind.

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