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Things we learned about getting married

Matt

Well... a mere 622 days after getting on bended knee and popping the question, our wedding day actually arrived. For so long our evenings seemed to revolve around one wedding activity or another. Whether it was some planning, some crafting, or practicing our first dance, so much of our free time was so focussed on the big day that, even now, we find ourselves wondering how we found the time!

This was our first (and hopefully last!) wedding, so what advice would we give to others embarking on this journey? Hindsight is, after all, 20:20.

Time flies

Whether your engagement is very short or very long, once the wedding date is set you’ve set the clock ticking, and that clock ticks faster than you realise. The sooner you start looking for ideas, themes, venues, suppliers, the more time there is to fine-tune them or find alternatives, depending on availability and budget.

Do your research

We thought we knew what we wanted, but the more venues we visited, the more fairs we attended and the more people we spoke to, made us realise that what we wanted may not be affordable, or even available. Starting the research early gave us plenty of time to understand what would make our day special to us.

We used local knowledge as well – not getting married local to where we lived, we joined the Facebook groups of the towns and villages near our preferred venues and suppliers and asked for recommendations from the locals – you can’t beat local knowledge.


Money, Money, Money!

Apparently you can get married in the UK for £200 or so. Pop along to your nearest registry office and away you go. But that’s not what we wanted.

Suppliers will also generally increase their prices year-on-year but, book early enough and they will usually honour the current year prices. This was where saved a lot. We’d meet our suppliers at wedding fairs while we looked for late ideas and would note that their prices had increased. By 20% in some cases!

However, you need to understand what size of wedding you want and then be prepared for the shock when the quote gets emailed through.

We started with an ideal budget, but as we factored in various extras and the guest list that kept growing, we realised that the budget needed revising – the end budget was barely recognisable compared to the start!

But at least we started with a budget, and contributed to it every month to make sure it kept going up (until the invoices started coming in!). But even trying to keep to a strict budget, we found that little extra costs just kept creeping in.

When we compared various suppliers, the important thing was to understand what we were paying and what were we getting. Most venues also vary their price based on the day of the week – ideally we would have married on a Saturday (our first date anniversary), but almost everywhere we saw bordered on extortion for a Saturday.

Depending on the supplier, there is real value in paying what seems over the odds for a service, if that service will take care of a lot of the to-do list, or avoid unexpected add-ons and costs later on.

This was especially true for our photographer. We nodded appreciatively when she told us how much she cost, while making a mental note to run a mile as soon as we were around the corner and out of sight. But as we spoke to more photographers and understood what they provided and, more importantly, what wasn’t included, we began to realise that while expensive, the overall package included a lot that others would consider "extras" and it really put our minds at ease. Things such as what time she was willing to start (and more importantly, finish), albums and engagement shoots, all would have resulted in additional costs further down the line with many other photographers we spoke to.

As the day got closer, and the final invoices started to rack up, we looked at our financing options. We could drop into our savings (we’d already cleared out the wedding savings fund), but having worked pretty hard to build them up we didn’t want a chunk taken out by a few large bills that we knew had been coming. We shopped around for an interest-free credit card to pay the last few invoices, and found one with 18 months interest-free credit on purchases. This way we could just keep paying off the card in the same way that we’d been building the wedding fund, and if things really went sideways, we still had the savings to fall back on, so we knew we hadn't overstretched ourselves.


We were very lucky that, although not financially blessed, we didn’t have many things on the day that we couldn’t realistically afford. There were a few moments when we had to tell ourselves off and go for the non-designer or smaller options, but ultimately people never know what’s gone on in the background and just want to have a good time!

Crafty shortcuts

If there’s one thing Pinterest and other social media will have you believing, it’s that there’s a hack for everything and you can make and design loads of things yourself. Which may be true if you’re artistically blessed, but we are not. At least in no great quantity!

Trying to do a lot of the day DIY definitely saved us some money along the way. Snaffling things up off of Facebook marketplace and whatever neighbours were giving away. We were just very fortunate (or persistent) in finding the useful things we needed for free, or at least very little.


Handing over the reins to someone else to do all the detail work is all well and good but they come at a cost and if your budget doesn’t cover that you either have to dial down your expectations or you’ll just have to figure it out and make it yourself. Could I make a sash bow when I started? No. But a few YouTube videos and plenty of practice and we had something that looked good enough for a centrepiece for the tables!

It’s always good to be savvy with where you’re getting your materials from too – you can get things like jars from Wilko and Hobbycraft, but why spend that money when your neighbours are probably giving the jars away for free and they only need a bit of effort to clean them up?

We found ourselves asking our village Facebook group for things we needed, or searching for the freebies on marketplace. We even grabbed a couple of games going cheap in charity shops to provide some alternative entertainment through the day.


Guests

Guests will always be a bone of contention, but it’s YOUR day and you should invite who YOU want. That said, there’s often an element of family politics involved and you can find yourself inviting people you’ve not spoken to in forever.



Friends usually already know where they stand and few will be surprised to either be invited or not be invited. If you’re not sure who makes the list, we found that if we met them for dinner and their card had been lost/declined, would we pay for them? That’s essentially what you’re doing on your wedding day and your answer should help you whittle down the list if you can’t just invite everyone.

And there will always be the flaky and the forgetful – the ones who either don’t respond or aren’t sure if they can make it. Your venue will probably need to know the final numbers, or at least a narrow ballpark figure, a couple of months out from the day, so don’t think twice about hassling them to respond one way or the other. And if they still don’t respond you can always make the decision for them.


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