WEDDING TIPS

Nine Cost Saving Ideas for Cutting Down the Budget of Your Wedding in Nigeria

Here are nine creative low budget wedding ideas to reduce and save cost without reducing quality, when preparing for your big day, we believe these ideas will help you out to have a low cost but quality wedding! #winks# enjoy!:

#1: Pre-agree on a Fixed Number of Guests

Save money on wedding catering and venue by setting a limit to the number of people to invite to your wedding, and stick to it. Even one single additional guest could make a big increase to your wedding budget beyond what you can afford. So, think twice before giving out invitation cards to everyone in your street or office. In a previous post, I showed you how to use your budget to know how many people you can cater for and should invite to your special day – use the steps in that article to determine how many guests the budget you have can cater for.

#2: Use SMS to Send Out Wedding Invites

Save money on invitation cards by using cheap bulk sms text messages, BB messages, emails and Facebook messaging to invite your age-mate friends and colleagues. Only print invitation cards for older guests, including your parents’ friends. This should cut cost of invitation cards by about 50% or more – be sure to let people know in the messages that they should consider the text messages as their formal invitation to the wedding. For the paper invitation cards, you may want to buy some packs of pre-printed wedding invitation cards for the folks that will require paper invites.

#3: Use One Venue for Both Ceremony and Reception

Another way to save cost on wedding venue is to hold your church/ religious joining ceremony and reception at one venue to save on duplicate venue hire.

#4: Have White and Trad Wedding on Same Day 

To save cost on feeding guests twice, choose to have both your white and trad wedding on the same day. And, if for any reason, the two weddings can’t hold on same day and you still want to save cost, invite only a handful of your close friends and family to the traditional wedding, so that the white wedding can be for a bigger audience.

#5: Avoid Setting Your Wedding Date On a Busy Month/ Week

As you know, every single additional guest increases the wedding budget, so you have to find a way to reduce crowd and unwanted guests. Minimize incidence of uninvited too many guests by choosing a non-peak and less traditional time to get married: avoiding popular Nigerian wedding months like December, Easter holidays, major public holidays, valentine’s day weekend; choose a weekday instead of a Saturday.

#6: Use an Old Jewellery

Use one of your old, hardly worn or not-yet-worn pieces of jewellery for the trad and/ or white wedding or borrow an occasion-jewelry from your mom or sisters (no one will notice it was not a new jewelry – they’ll only notice that you looked elegant walking down the aisle).

#7: Buy a Non-Diamond Wedding Ring

Save cost on wedding rings by buying a ring with cheaper precious stones instead of an expensive diamond wedding ring – those are cheaper and still gorgeous. Even celebrities are wearing non-diamond engagement and wedding rings – royal bride, Kate Middleton’s engagement ring stone was sapphire; Facebook founder, Matt Zuckerberg’s bride had ruby stone. So, explore other elegant non-diamond wedding ring stone options – they are a lot cheaper than diamond.

#8: Wear a Really Long Wedding Gown

Save money on wedding shoes by wearing one of your old, unworn or nearly new shoes or a cheap one, and then buy a really long wedding gown style that will hide your shoes. No one will even notice your foot-wear and you’ll win by saving yourself from buying expensive wedding shoes .

#9: Go to the Hair Salon for the Bridal Hair

A day before your wedding or about four hours before, take yourself to the hair salon to do your wedding day hair, instead of bringing the hairdresser to your bridal suite – this should cut down your hair styling cost as you’ll not be paying extra ‘home-service’ fee for taking the hairstylist out of his/ her shop.