So you’re engaged now, but you’re figuring out that you will have to pay for everything out of your own (and your future husband’s) pocket.  Maybe you are estranged from your parents; maybe your parents have sadly passed away; or maybe your parents are simply too poor to even help pay a small fraction of your wedding costs.  So what do you do?  You want to have a beautiful wedding, but you and your future husband aren’t exactly rolling in the dough.  You will need to first figure out how much wedding you can afford, set your budget, save up for it, and plan everything according to your budget.

Before I start providing tips and suggestions on what to look for to plan your wedding on a budget, I wanted to talk about my wedding.

My situation falls into the third category presented above – my parents are poor.  They live on social security and what little my dad can eek out with side-jobs.  Often they would ask ME to lend them some money.  So, they would certainly not be paying for my entire wedding, even a budget one.  And neither is it typical for the groom’s family to pay for the wedding, so even though my husband’s family is a little better off than mine, we weren’t going to expect them to help, either – at least not with everything.

So we determined we would pay for it ourselves, and in order to do so, we would need to keep it as cheap as possible.

There are a several things we did to keep the costs down, but I will go into more detail with everything in future posts.

First though, you will need to decide when to have your wedding!