I’ve always wanted to do a series about inexpensive but great weddings and since it’s a busy end of the week, I thought you’d appreciate getting to know a few more cool people. The following three days will feature three couples and how they had the day of their dreams without sticker shock.
The Happy Couple: Sean and Stacy
Location of Wedding: Popham Beach (Phippsburg, ME)
Date: October 11, 2003
Total Cost of Wedding: $9000 (eek!)
$150 ceremony
$2000 Maine Maritime Museum (reception)
$2000 plated meal
$1000 open bar
$500 band
$200 flowers
$75 car
$3000 honeymoon
Tell us about your wedding day. (How many people were there, what was the ceremony like, overall impressions, etc.)
The ceremony was at Popham Beach on a beautiful, unusually warm fall day in the late afternoon. It was a pretty informal setting – our friend officiating, the ceremony area was delineated from the rest of the beach with stones and seaweed, and we had to shout our vows to be heard over the ocean.
The ceremony itself was non-demonational and we drew from Native American readings and wedding blessings. Within minutes of the ceremony being over, a huge fog bank swept over the beach! So we have some pictures pre-fog and some in the fog.
The reception was tons of fun. I really loved that we had the contradance and that pretty much everyone participated and seemed to love it even though we were crashing into each other. The only thing I’d wished was that we could’ve kept the hall for later in the evening. The museum had a policy of kicking people out at 10 pm which seemed kind of lame to us, though we were extremely exhausted by then anyway.
What were some ways that you saved money in planning your wedding?
Keeping it small – we initially wanted it to be VERY small (30 people) but in the end we had about 75 – still very small by most standards
Having the ceremony on a beach. $50 or so to the State Park plus the cost of rental chairs
Having our friend officiate the ceremony. FREE
Rather than renting a limo, we were able to use an antique car owned by a friend of a friend….we still paid the guy something for use of the car but it was much less than a limo and more fun! $50-$75
Flowers – while we did use a florist, the flowers were very simple and since the wedding was on the beach there was no need to decorate the ceremony site. $200
Where did you splurge, and why?
Contradance band $500 – we didn’t want a cheesy DJ and since we’re both into old timey music we felt this was essential.
Open bar – we wanted everyone to have fun (and dad pretty much insisted on it!) (still bummed that sean and I were too busy to have more than 1 drink a piece….haha) $1,000?
Honeymoon – we both love traveling and to us this was the most important aspect. We went to Portugal for three weeks. I believe we spent around $3000 (which isn’t too bad considering how long we were there. We lived quite cheaply while we were there – stayed at small inns, didn’t eat out every single meal, etc.
What advice would you give to couples planning a wedding on a budget?
Don’t let parents hijack the planning though I suppose in our case it worked out okay since the parents ended up paying more for it than we expected they would!
“ Take away the honeymoon (which if I remember correctly, was funded using wedding gift $$ anyway) and this was a $6000 wedding. We really strove to keep this cheap and simple, but then parents and unforseen hurdles came about.Stacy mentioned the open bar thing, which added a significant expense. Also we were originally gonig to have the reception at the Bowdoinham Town Hall for a mere $25, but the caterer insisted we do it somewhere with running water. So had that worked out we’d have knocked another $2000 or so off the total price. Had all the original plans worked out, it would’ve been more like $3000, which is really where we were aiming. This is the biggest thing to consider – best laid plans don’t always work out, other people will have strong feelings about the wedding, and other feasible options might not be cheap.”
“ Oh another comment:Our photographers were a young couple who charged a VERY modest fee in exchange for letting them use our photos in their portfolio. They took literally hundreds of candid shots and only a few posed shots. They were really well done in terms of composition etc – technically excellent and artistically beautiful. Luckily for us and them, the scenery, weather, and sunset were all very beautiful and all the photos came out with a really beautiful golden hue. I don’t remember quite how we found out about them, maybe word of mouth?Other friends used these two as their photographers, on our reccommendation, and were equally pleased with the results.Anyway, a fraction of the cost of a portrait photographer and certainly much better results (no awkward poses!)”
What a beautiful couple!