It is very easy to get carried away when planning your wedding. Your wedding is the one occasion when it is easy to go overboard. Money that would be better spent on buying a house or finalizing your school loans can easily disappear in its hundreds and thousands. Anything a bride-to-be can imagine is available to be purchased somewhere, with the wedding industry worth billions of dollars every year. But you don’t need to break the bank to have a fantastic wedding day.

Keep it Small

You’ve got your notepad and pen, and you’ve started listing names. 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. The majority of people will understand that you are simply watching your expenses, and will wish you all 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. If the worst happens and they are angry for the snub, they’ll get over it. If they don’t you’re probably better off.

Think Discount

Don’t pay top dollar. You can often save a lot of money by looking at discount alternatives. There are plenty of discounters that sell very nice wedding dresses and other formal attire at reduced prices. 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. You may have to spend a little extra for tailoring, but the money you save in the end can pay for things that you really need. You can do the same thing when organizing your shoes, hair, makeup, flowers, and all of the other details that go into making your wedding day perfect. Let the rich and famous worry about paying full price!

Green is the New Black

Another way to temper your budget is to think green. Up-cycled items may be the perfect way to save you money. Although environmentally friendly products such as organic vegetables and recycled goods tend to be more expensive than their counterparts, thinking green for your wedding may just help you come in under budget. If you have friends or relatives that have more than one wedding under their belt, chances are they have an attic full of once-worn dresses. 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. A little work by a good tailor can easily turn that recycled treasure into a gown befitting a princess for a much smaller investment than a brand new dress.

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