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First, I love love love love your site. Thank you! For the first time since the person who is truly the-love-of-my-life proposed to me I find I am actually daydreaming a little about our wedding day.
I could go on and on about us and how awesome your site is for people like us but here’s the real deal: we really have zero money for this. I just bought a house and we will have the wedding there — venue is covered — but the rest? The sites I can find for “budget” or “DIY” wedding don’t share my definition of “budget” or “DIY.” The “Broke-ass Bride” had an $8,000 budget. On my scale, that is not “broke-ass.”
Can you point me to an example of something from actually nothing? Please help!
-Jeanette
Hiya, Jeanette! You have come to the right place. Over the years, Offbeat Bride has featured hundreds of lower budget weddings, which live in our massive low-budget wedding archives. Seriously, 52 pages of economical weddings ranging from micro-budgets to more generally tighter budgets — it's a huge archive full of LOTS of ideas for saving money.
Here's where things get complex, though: “lower budget” is a relative term. We all know this. Lower budget in New York means something pretty different from Omaha. You say you have “zero money” your wedding, but if that was actually true, you would go to a courthouse and pay the government fee and call it good. Since we all know that “zero money” doesn't actually mean $0.00, here are a few real dollar examples of “not actually zero, but still pretty still pretty small budget” weddings we've featured:
$2000 wedding
$1000 wedding
$700 wedding
$500 wedding
$100 wedding
Making things even more complex with these “real budget” posts is that the exact dollar amounts can be a little wobbly, depending on how the couple defines their expenses… the $100 wedding didn't include their clothes, which they already had. When you get down to micro-budgets, things get a little grey… and really, I'm super NOT into playing the “one lowsmanship” game, where we all stand around and thump our chests about how little we spent on our weddings.
“…Oh yeah? You think your $1000 budget was small? We got married for 35 cents and a handjob for the county judge! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT POVERTY IS.” C'mon, you guys. This isn't a contest. You're not going to win anything around here that way.
Money is weird, and how people choose to spend their money isn't really our business. We're not big fans of going into debt for your wedding, but even that is your financial decision. At Offbeat Bride, we trust you to do your research and make choices for yourself. We're not into budget shaming.
In closing, we'll share this statistic about the current state of wedding budgets:
Fully a third of surveyed couples are working with budgets under $10,000… and that's a lot of us. We can do this.
