You Don’t Need To Personalise Every Aspect of Your Wedding

Some couples want to personalise every aspect of their wedding. I’ve been to weddings where everything was personalised from the serviettes, table clothes, even the cutlery was engraved with the bride and groom’s initial. This same couple also had most of the lollies in the lolly buffet personalised with their name and wedding date. Most guests end up leaving the empty wrappers at the reception anyway.

Whilst the idea is nice in theory, you can end up spending quite a bit of money personalising everything, especially if you are stretching your budget to do so. So if you are looking for ways to trim the fat off your wedding budget, ditch the personalisation.

Find Your Wedding Supplies at Home

Do you have any wedding supplies at home?

Just because you are planning a wedding, it doesn’t mean that you need to go out and buy everything. Take a good and hard look around your house and see what you can use. Do you have a nice lace tablecloth that can be used for the guest book table? A great bouquet of silk flowers that can be used to dress  up the venue? Expand your search wider to family and friends and see what you can borrow from them. You may end up saving a fair bit of money with just some careful pre-planning.

Save Money by Hiring Your Wedding Gown

One option to get a wedding dress for significantly cheaper is to hire your gown rather than buying one. The first thing you need to do, is to truthfully consider whether this is the right option for you. If you have any strong notions of preserving your wedding gown for an heirloom, then obviously hiring  a gown is not for you.

Another major consideration when hiring a gown is allowing yourself enough time to source and book a dress in advance. Obviously there are far less gowns available for rent than for sale, so you need to ensure that you have adequate time to find your ‘dream’ gown and more importantly that it is available on your wedding day

Many rental places can also provide you with packages that include all your wedding gown accessories, such as shoes, veils and jewelery. If you are renting the gown anyway, it is ideal to hire out the entire ensemble and the store would have matching accessories on hire.

As with any aspect of your wedding planning, ensure that you have thoroughly read the contract (and fine print) before signing. Make sure that you are familiar with the renting terms, such as when the dress will be available to you and any associated fees. Find out whether the gown cleaning fee is included in the price of the gown or whether you are expected to pay an additional fee for this. Make sure that you get a copy of the signed contract. If you and the rental outlet make any verbal amendments to the renting terms such as picking up the gown a day earlier than the usually store policy, make sure that this amendments is added to the contract. This is extremely important, as from the time that you make the verbal agreement, to the date of the gown pick-up, months could have passed and words can easily be forgotten and staff and management could have changed.

There are some cases when hiring a gown is not always the most financially beneficial option. You need to do all the sums. If you are comfortable wearing a used gown, you may even find that buying a second-hand dress could end up being value for money, as the gown would have had less usage out of it than a rental one and consequently would be in better shape.

At the end of the day, what’s important to remember, is that as a bride, there are plenty of choices available to you. Whether you decide to buy or hire your gown is a purely personal choice that only you can make.