How to plan a low budget wedding!

How I planned a $12,000 wedding in 5 months

In today's world, the newly engaged are so bombarded with to-do lists, decor, wedding outfits, and registries that is easy to stray from the point - getting married to the love of your life. A quick google search of "wedding" will result in photos of $50,000 to $100,000+ weddings that most of us cannot afford. I say, we take it back to the basics and save our money for longer investments - like a house. This is how we planned our $12,000 dollar wedding in 5 months.







Deciding what is important to you

My husband and I got engaged in May of 2023 with a hefty goal of getting married on our dating anniversary in October 2023, leaving us with barely 5 months to plan. Fortunately, many steps in planning worked out smoothly for us! The first steps in planning are deciding what parts of the wedding are important to you so you can invest your money and energy into. After going back and forth about eloping or full wedding, we ended up deciding we wanted both our family and our friends there for the big day and a full wedding to celebrate with everyone we loved.

Choosing your venue

Your venue should be one of the first decisions you make. The venue not only determines what the photos will look like, but also the guest count (based on capacity of the space), and this can really affect your budget. We chose a venue that was important to us, a ski chalet in the Porcupine Mountains in the UP of Michigan, a few miles down from Noah's family cabin where we first said I love you and our favorite place to be. Luckily for us, this was a not a typical wedding venue so the cost for our venue, including set up the night before and tear down the following morning, was $1100. A steal - I know. Our venue also limited us to 100 guests which gave us a starting point to narrow down our guest count. If you are not already emotionally/financially tied to a venue, I recommend looking into a location that does not typically host weddings. This could be somewhere you frequent together like a restaurant, a theatre, a State Park, or your friend's backyard. Keeping the cost of the venue low will help keep your budget low and allow you to splurge in other places.





Splurging on what matters

This is your wedding, you decide how you want to spend it. Our biggest splurge was our photographer. Obviously, I love photos and after it was all said and done, photos are all we would have left of the day. Our photographer was Thomas and Co. photography out of Iowa, a married couple who are the perfect balance of fun and calm energy - I can't put into words how grateful I am to have had them there for our day in some of the most intimate moments. Choosing a photographer you vibe with is so important because they are going to be with you in every room throughout the day and can have a big impact on the flow of everything. We lucked out big time! For our wedding photos, including engagement photos (we did rehearsal dinner photos instead), we paid $3400. I still adore our wedding photos. As a budget-friendly wedding and elopement photographer, I am not saying you have to splurge on the photographer, I am only saying to prioritize what is most important to you. After it all, I do wish we had saved a little extra to invest in some video but, the iPhone videos from family are more than enough for us.

Shop vintage/secondhand

I am an avid thrifter and antiquer so this may come more naturally to me than to others but, I think everyone is capable of shopping second-hand. For all my bridal activities, (bridal shower, bachelorette, rehearsal, getting-ready outfit, reception dress) I shopped second-hand, partially because everything new was expensive, partially because it was more true-to-me and easier for me to find things that fit my vision. I did most of my shopping on Depop and Poshmark and there are plenty of secondhand bridal themed online shops as well! I was so excited to find a vintage Victoria Secret Long Slip ($25) and Robe ($20) off of Depop for the morning of. I was so blessed to find my grandmother's long sleeve silk wedding dress from 1962 in the closet of her farmhouse! It was yellow and stiff but, shockingly it fit!! I wasn't sure if they would be able to save it but, I found a seamstress (The Threaded Needle - Dyserville, Iowa) who was absolutely amazing. They brought the original ivory back to life and replaced all of the rusted buttons (300 buttons!!) and made the dress fit perfectly. I wouldn't have found a dress more perfect if I tried and the total cost of alterations was $900 including altering my reception dress. Not everyone has a Grandma with impeccable taste but, I have found many gorgeous vintage wedding dresses at thrift and antique stores, specifically in the Midwest. This can be a great way to save money and find something that really suits you. Suits can also be altered, thrifted, designed to achieve something unique without spending an arm and a leg on a rental (we, however, did go with a rental tux ~$300).





Decor

Keep it simple! You can create beautiful scenes with simple pieces. Know where you are willing to spend more. We had a vision of what we wanted with lots of colorful flowers and candles, but this can get pricey quick. I searched the internet for cheaper real flower options. My findings - Costco and Traders Joes if you have one local to you or the venue and you can custom order, neither of these were nearby for us so I found some online vendors that shipped to our location. I went with FiftyFlowers ($286) and Flower Moxie ($436) as these were the best prices with the options I wanted (, but there were plenty of options out there! That being said, my friends and family were asked to assist with setting up florals and creating mine and my bridesmaid bouquets - thankfully I have creative people in my life who were so helpful, but if this isn't something you have the capacity for, consider a local or beginner florist! We then thrifted around 50 bud vases for the tables and used marketplace to find tapered candle holders and tea light holders (~$100) . We used vintage handkerchiefs from mine and Noah's grandmothers had collected over years to line the tables like a table runner - one of my favorite details! We used photos of us from age 1-14 for table numbers and designed those on Canva. Noah's mom found oversized clothes pins at a craft store to stand up the table numbers and his dad made us an arch out of driftwood from the cabin's beach that we used for the ceremony and the reception. It's all about the personal touches for me.

Food + Drinks

This one can get the best of you and is very dependent on guest count and taste! I really recommend doing your research, exploring your options, and choosing somewhere with catering experience. This is another are where we lucked out big time! Our venue actually recommended checking out a local diner, somewhere we frequent often, that had a huge catering list and would pretty much make anything we wanted. They gave us price ranges based mostly on the meats and other main options we were asking about. We ended up going with some simple options and doing buffet style so everyone could eat as much as they wanted and there would be plenty of leftovers! They not only handled anything and everything catering, they also supplied all of the linens (table cloths and napkins - $1 per) as well as the plates and silverware and did all the clean up so we didn't have to worry about any of it. We were so impressed with their service and the food, all of our guests were complimenting us on the food! This catering ended up being about $1400 for 100 people. Noah's mom made these amazing, massive charcuterie boards for cocktail hour - I still dream about the crackers she made. My sister is a baker so she made our wedding cake and we just bought some donuts and cupcakes from the local Walmart for dessert. I truly believe you can do whatever you want for food and don't need to worry about the "late night snack" and other trendy food items. Don't sweat the small stuff, get your people involved and see where you can cut some costs!

I started working at a brewery around the time that Noah and I started dating so we had many memories there with some of our favorite beers. We got 2 half kegs for $250 and supplemented with lots of light beers and sodas. Noah's parents handled the drinks and ordered 8+ boxes of wine bottles from Splash wine ($100-150 per box of 18). We had tens of bottles of wine leftover even after the guests were well supplied! (Our venue did not permit liquor, though some guests brought some bottles to share.)





Music

Another lucky category for us, or just utilizing our connections and the people we love to make things cheaper for us! When I worked at the brewery, we would host open mic nights that Noah would participate in and this is how we met many of our friends. One of our friends there makes his own music and expressed that he wanted to try to DJ a wedding one day, little did he know we were already planning ours! We asked him to DJ and he was stoked. Him and his parents are very talented musicians who we also wanted to share our day with. We invited them to sing for our cocktail hour and they did beautifully. For the ceremony, we had selected songs for us to walk down the aisle to, not knowing that just before our ceremony was about to start, the power for the whole county would go out. Thankfully, we had these very talented musicians who hopped in and sang us down the aisle, choosing some of our favorite songs without even asking us! I am so so grateful we had them there and that they are so intuitive and genuine. Invite the right people who will go above and beyond to make sure you have the best day!! We paid them $600 ($400 for DJ, $200 for an-hour performance at cocktail hour.) If you don't know any talented musicians, check out your local open mic night or live music venues and see if there is anyone you like who may be willing. Alternatively, at my brother-in-law's wedding, he created a couple playlists and just attached his phone to a speaker and it went so well! Just ask a friend or family member to handle the ceremony and first dance parts and the rest pretty much handles itself.

SUITE

We kept our suite pretty simple, but this is where we splurged a bit! I designed our Save-the-Dates on Canva as postcards and had them printed at a local print shop (~$50) and sent them without envelopes. We bought stamps for both the save the dates and invitations for around $70 (this price would probably be a bit higher in 2026). For the invitations, I was set on them being letter pressed and though I am a big DIYer, this felt like a huge feat. So I ended up finding a UK based company called Artcadia who did an amazing job and communicated with me for months to get everything perfect - they even sent over samples of paper, envelopes, and fonts so we could see what the colors looked like and paper felt like! After shipping, these invitations cost around 650 US dollars which is more than I wanted to spend, but we still have one of our invitations hanging on our fridge and everytime I look at it I love it more so I have no regrets! Choose what feels right to you!!

Rings

You already did all this shopping for your engagement ring, and now you have to source two more rings? Yes, unless you don't want to of course! Do whatever you feel is right. We found a local jeweler (Brody Designs - Stevens Point, Wisconsin) who was so easy to work with and timely. My engagement ring is a gold band, three stoned Emerald center with two diamonds surrounding it. I just wanted a simple gold band and Noah wanted a gold band with stones embedded in it to match mine. Going in, we were unsure if this would work or be in our price range. Brody made it so clear what our options were and we could basically adjust the price based on the sizing of what we choose. In the end, we were more than satisfied with our rings and he had them ready for us within 3 weeks. I highly recommend finding a small, local jeweler you can trust that makes you feel comfortable and is easy to work with! We ended up paying ~$1000 for both rings. Noah is a woodworker and made our ring box (and another ring box he used to proposed!)

Other Expenses

The urge to buy things you think you need at the last minute was real. I did my own makeup, I am just picky - don't do it if it's going to bring you more stress, so I invested in nicer makeup for the weekend that I still get to use! I found two small black books of recycled paper that my local print shop makes for 50 cents each and used those as the vow books, Noah and I turned the pens together that we then used to sign our license and write our vows. I paid my longtime friend and hairdresser to do my hair ($150) and was happy to have her there for the ceremony and party as well. I bought shoes for the rehearsal and wedding spending about $120 together. A week before my bachelorette, I ordered a pair of metallic pink cowboy boots that arrived just in time and I felt a little guilty for buying even though they looked cute. Until, our wedding day was gloomy and had some rain so I threw them into my stuff for the venue and put them on quickly after the family photos for some outside photos. I ended up wearing them the rest of the night because they were significantly more comfy than my wedding shoes! A last minute splurge that was totally worth it. The rest of our funds just went to random purchases like ribbon for my flowers and boob tape. This is your day, spend the money how you want and you can still have a gorgeous wedding on a budget! Happy planning:)