Updated Wedding Budget
Since I’ve been talking and thinking about it, here is the BUDGET part of the wedding. Throw rocks if you want, I don’t care! Here was the original version.
This should be fairly accurate. The alcohol is high, the food may even be high (kids won’t get full adult meals). Selected notes:
Hotel: I booked us a hotel for two nights surrounding the wedding when the rooms on my ideal hotel fell to a total of $350 for 2 nights. Except I booked the wrong dates and had to cancel — by then the sale was over and now it is $550 so we’ll probably skip it unless it goes down again. We live reasonably close to the wedding that the hotel was pure luxury.
Car: I’ve generally included expenses other people paid for me, but my dad found us convertible a rental for $50 for the whole weekend. Now, it is nothing fancy of course, but all I really wanted was to avoid having to drive my 11 year old car. This is not listed.
Invites: We spent way too much on invitations, but managed to offload the announcements/invites for the midwest reception to T’s mom (she’s running that whole show!). The per invite cost was (insanely) high, but the total was manageable. We did not DIY. I let T pick them and he picked some fancy theme with raised printing. We were in a rush (and they are very cute) so I went along with it. A day later I died at the per invite & RSVP cost when I actually took the total and divided it by 50.
We make map/direction cards ourselves — T did them and they turned out GREAT! We also got some ribbon for belly bands, secured by Zots. Call me tacky if you want, but we printed the envelope addresses with our printer. I have bad handwriting and think hiring a calligrapher is totally not worth it, so there it is. I promise the invites looked fabulous! But if you are looking for tips on how to do your invites for a reasonable price, look elsewhere. We did it totally wrong.
Reception Flowers: We just did these this past weekend. OMG flowers are expensive. This isn’t even for many. Anyway, I’m glad it is done. They are going to be super pretty. 🙂
Favors: Pretty sure I’m doing these, two per a box in some cute aqua boxes my sister sent me. Naturally we had to sample them — YUM. Plus, local! (Well, local-ish, beverly hills isn’t exactly my hood.)
Honeymoon talk will come LATER! My travel fund needs a serious boost!
Stacking Pennies 
The thing I hate most about wedding budgets is that all of the expenses seem so reasonable, and then you add it up and somehow, it’s 5 figures. I am extremely jealous of your food costs – it makes me realize just how screwed we got through our venue!
Your invitations are so cute!
The food is really good too! But all the “real” venues were $95-$150 per a person for food. which is why we didn’t do that.
Dude, if printing your address labels is wrong, I don’t know a single person who has done it right in years. It’s either handscribble or printed labels.
I have nothing original to say on this one SP… but I do think its awesome that you broke down the cost of wedding cake to $7.50/slice. I think that’s hilarious and awesome at the same time.
That is not me! That is how it is priced from the cake store. If we get a smaller one, it is cheaper.
But it is still kind of awesome.
just a random note, but i totally support doing your own makeup (and i used to do makeup as a job) for your wedding! the ideal, in my mind, is to look like an extra-special version of yourself for your wedding, but when you have someone else do your makeup, you run the risk of looking like their idea of your best self. doing your own with a few extra touches ensures that your groom will know which one’s his lady 😉