by Mark Garro | Thrifty Tips
You may have noticed lately that ThriftyGuardian has had a LOT of guest posts and I promise it’s not because I’m getting lazy š
Rather (if you haven’t yet heard….)
WE GOT MARRIED! š
So needless to say, I had to bring a few friends to help keep ThriftyGuardian running while I juggled wedding planning + #thetoddlers + running my own business…easy peasey, right?
Well I’m happy to say that I’m back at it and I’m eager to share with you how I put together a frugal wedding that didn’t look frugal!
My Frugal Wedding Planning
When we finally picked a date, my first thought was of course about the budget (heh I can’t help it! Frugality is life!)
I knew I wanted to throw a wedding downtown, it was important to me that no one feel tempted to drive, regardless of how much they were or weren’t drinking. I also wanted to be able to continue the party at my all-time favorite bar (Floyd’s, for those of you who are local!)
When I brought up my plans to my maid-of-honor, she scoffed. “There’s no way you can throw a wedding in Springfield for less than $5k,” she told me. And after I spoke to a few other friends, I began to fear she was right.
The Right Place, The Right Time
As luck would have it, my MoH and I happened to head out for a girl’s night to a new(ish) place in town – Arlington’s Restaurant. As we walked in, I was immediately in awe — this place was GORGEOUS! And the food….oooh my goodness. I was in love.
And guess what?
Our waitress just happened to mention that the upstairs area was available for rent!!
Now not only were we lucky in that this beautiful space was available (I’ve recently heard they’ll well booked through January 2018!) but it fit well within our budget.
I was sold.
You’ve got the wedding venue – now what?
Once the wedding venue was booked, the hard part began. There were so many decisions to be made! Time frame, food, drinks, hotel block, colors, decorations…so much to do and I’d given myself only six months to do it!
Given that my entire business runs around my ability to be efficient, I knew the first thing to do was to develop that budget. Having a number in mind is great, but was it possible? Only one way to find out…
(Please note this article contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission should you click through. This in no way impacts my recommendation of any products/services.)
Developing Your Wedding Budget
To begin, set a budget that gives you a tiny bit of buffer, but not so much that you’ll be tempted to spend when you don’t have to. Again, my budget was $5,000 (with us ideally staying under $4,000!) If you’re getting ready to plan your own wedding, please take my advice when I say – do NOT Google average prices of various wedding components! For example, wedding flowers cost an average of $2,000 (!!) Ooph. No.
Figure out what you feel is fair/reasonable and go from there, adjusting as necessary but recognizing that adding to one area will pull from another.
Our original Wedding Budget was as follows:
| Groom’s Clothing/Accessories |
120 |
| Bride’s Clothing/Accessories |
150 |
| Kid’s Clothing |
150 |
| Venue |
2,000 |
| Cake |
300 |
| Bridal Party Gifts |
200 |
| Photos |
1000 |
| “Honeymoon” |
500 |
| Misc |
500 |
| TOTAL |
$4,920 |
Now, I already know what you’re thinking – $150 for the bride?! $500 for a photographer?! Where’s the DJ??!
Well stick with me, we’ll get there…
Wedding Budget – The Clothing
I’ve never been a “big wedding, expensive white dress” kind of gal, so that alone really helped us in saving money while still giving us an end result we loved. I had two desires when it came to the wedding clothing –
1. I wanted to wear a petticoat. I love petticoats.
2. Henry (our 3 yr old) needed suspenders. He looks flippin’ ADORABLE in suspenders.
So my starting place involved petticoats and suspenders…how could I NOT do a Rockabilly/50s theme??
Answer: I couldn’t. Rockabilly it was!
I clicked on over to Amazon and sure enough, found the perfect wedding dress for only $30!!
And because I’m a kind, wonderful bride (though maybe too kind…more on that later…) I had my bridesmaids buy the same dresses, but in a different color. Having spent nearly $200 on my own bridesmaid dress a few years ago, there was no way I’d inflict the same financial pain on someone else.
Then for my accessories, I went with a bird cage veil,Ā white Mary Jane(esque) shoes, and some costume pearls. All-in-all, my total wardrobe cost: $80 (original budget: $150)
We lucked out with our daughter’s clothing, in that we happened to visit my mom when her local JcPenney was closing! My daughter’s dress cost us $7 and even with her shoes and the same set of pearls I bought myself, her overall outfit cost us $32 (original budget: $75)
For the men, we decided to keep things simple. They wore white shirts, black pants, and black/white Chucks. My husband’s and son’s clothing cost a total of $200 (original budget: $195) – a bit over budget, until we factored in Rakuten!
Total spent on clothing for the family: $312 (original budget: $420)
Saving Money on the Wedding Venue
Thus far we were well on track to staying under budget, but food and drinks can add up FAST. Do you do an open bar or cash bar? Sit down dinner or a cocktail hour? Decisions, decisions…
Personally, I’m a beer drinker so if we were going to have ANY free drinks, it was going to be beer. With the guidance of our amazing venue owner, we went with keg beer and a soda bar, everything else being cash bar. And that would be my biggest tip here – TRUST YOUR VENUE OWNER! If you can’t trust the owner, you may need to reconsider where you’re doing business. Ideally your venue owner will be upfront and honest in what works and what doesn’t for your specific budget.
And as I mentioned earlier, our venue has absolutely PHENOMENAL food (heh and clearly I LOVE food!) so figuring out the best plan of action was a bit tough. We ended up going with a later wedding – a start time of 6:30pm – and doing a variety of appetizers (or “drunk people food” as I liked to call ’em). We did decide to provide dinner for the bridal party beforehand so they could eat in between pictures and the wedding, but even with that expense, our total venue cost ended up being right on the nose at about $2,000. So far, so good!
Do You Really Need a Fancy Wedding Cake?
I’ll be honest here – we could have saved a lot more on our wedding cakes than we did but uh…TOTALLY worth it.
Obviously the bigger/taller your cake, the more expensive it’ll be. We ordered “sheet cakes” (the prettiest darn sheet cakes I’ve ever seen!!) and got enough to feed 100 people. Total cost: $280
As with everything in wedding planning, you really have to decide what’s most important to you. Would you rather have a huge wedding cake that costs you $6/serving or something that actually lasts beyond the night – like photos or favors?
DIY Wedding Decor
I’m HUGE into DIY and crafting, so that went a long way in helping us save money in our “Misc./Decor” budget. Not to mention we chose a venue that was already gorgeous, so what decor we did need was minimal.
Rather than rent linens from the venue ($15/piece), I kept an eagle eye on our local Facebook resale groups. We were able to pick up all the linens and table runners we needed for only $8/piece and then resold them for $10! Not bad, eh?
We also found a ton of mason jars at a garage sale and I already had other necessities – ribbon, glue, and hot glue guns galore!
I did buy some submersible tea lights to glue to the top of the mason jars and then all I did to create the centerpieces was spray glitter inside the jars, glue flowers to the tops, and wrap some ribbon/pearls around ’em. I added a few butterflies in honor of my grandma who passed in 2001 – she LOVED butterflies.
I then used the extra pearl strands and ribbon we had to do some decor for the chair backs:
Can You Do Your Own Wedding Photos?
Our biggest budget-saver was when we decided to do our own wedding photos and I am SO glad we did. Now I’m definitely not discounting the benefits of hiring a professional photographer, but I love having saved so much money while also having full access to each and every photo taken that day. While there are a lot of reasons to hire a professional wedding photographer, I feel there were a lot of photos taken that would have otherwise been missed had we hired someone not familiar with our friends/family. So rather than spending $500+ on a photographer, we spent about $100 on a “thank you” gift for a friend who gave us over 500 BEAUTIFUL shots of our entire day.
We also decided to have a photo booth at our wedding and asked that everyone leave us a copy. We built a collapsible display board with chicken wire and everyone loved it. So not only did we have photos of our friends/family being fun and goofy, but everyone got as many favors as they wanted to remember this beautiful day. We even bought little butterfly clothespins from Amazon for only $10 – totally worth it!
Total cost for photographer/photo booth: $360 (original budget: $1,000)
Saving Money on Music & Wedding Flowers
When I first Googled “wedding flowers” and saw the average cost was usually $2,000, my heart dropped; that’s nearly half my budget!! Luckily I love gardening, so set aside some space in our backyard and went about our usual frugal gardening adventures. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out quite as it was supposed to (and legally I’m not allowed to say what happened…) but should you go the route of growing your own wedding flowers, take my word for it when I say you need to make sure no one will “accidentally” spray weed killer near your yard (*grumble grumble*)
Even if you don’t grow your own flowers, though, there are a number of ways you can still save money! We ended up using a lot of fake flowers and I simply cut and pieced them together to make our decorations and bouquets:
Then we stopped by our local farmer’s market on the day of and picked up a few bunches of live sunflowers – which we later had fun handing out downtown after the wedding to confused-but-happy bar friends.
In terms of music, we really had fun with that! Rather than spending $300-$500 on a DJ, I decided to do it myself…with a little help from our friend T-Rox:
Instead of a traditional “dollar dance”, we decided to encourage people to donate to our amazing DJ so he could fly first class back to the Prehistoric period (yes. seriously.)
All I did to DJ my own wedding was make separate playlists for each part of the wedding: music pre-ceremony, music during mingling after the ceremony, then dance music. Since I already own a microphone for my business, it was easy to record and plug in a few key pieces to keep the flow going as I wished. I used Raise to buy a discounted ITunes gift card (and Rakuten saved me even more from there!) and even after I gave TRox his cut, we managed to only have to spend $70 on the music and I was able to guarantee the songs I wanted were played when I wanted them. This was probably my favorite part of the whole wedding shebang.
The Final Total
All-in-all our wedding total came in just under $4,000 (and that includes the honeymoon!) Obviously we could have cut corners even further, but I’m quite pleased with how it all came together and that we avoided hurting ourselves financially for one single event, even one as big as a wedding.
by Mark Garro | Self Care
When it comes to showing yourself love, what comes to mind?
For a very long time I thought it meant biweekly spa days – complete with massage, mani/pedi, etc. As a busy wife and mother, that not only didnāt fit my schedule, but it certainly didnāt fit my budget! Not only was the money literally not there, but even if it had been, Iād feel guilty for spending on myself when there were other things I felt the funds would be better used for. I would be the one to justify $50 on a Lego set for my 7 year old (it encourages STEM thinking for peteās sake!) before a mani/pedi for Mama.
If youāre in the same boat, grab an oar, and letās navigate this river of life with 10 amazing (and yet thrifty) ways we can take care of ourselves!
10 Ways to Show Yourself Love – For FREE!
Happy happy happy list
Make a list of the things that make you happy. You can start as early as you can and just keep a running tally throughout the day if you want. Be sure to leave out the “but”s or the “even thoughs” – just feel into the happiness If you happen to have a day where things arenāt feeling so great – you can pull out your list and smile because thereās so much that does make you happy. You can also add the things that bring you joy, the things youāre thankful for, and the things you want to soak up and have more of.
Find Cute Pens on Amazon
Do a little purging
The spaces around us are a reflection of what’s IN us. I find that when I allow things to pile up literally – it can affect how I feel. When we take some time to straighten up our physical spaces, it allows room for the good stuff. It’s the basis of Feng shui and minimalism. Most of us have too much stuff (or too many people!) to be a one cup per person household. But we do have at least one space that we could situate. Maybe your hall closet or under your bathroom sink is making you sigh every time you open the door. Maybe you need to sort thru your undies and toss the 15 year old grannies. Pick a space, declutter, and make room for something good and beautiful.
Do a body scan
Find 2 or 3 minutes (or more if you’d like). Start at your toes, and REALLY feel them – focus all of your energy into your toes. Ask them if they are well, and if there’s anything they need. Then proceed to your calves, knees, thighs, etc.
Women’s power is in their essence – we are quite intuitive when we allow that part of ourselves to be heard. See what comes up for you and if there’s a part of your body that needs some extra attention that you can provide.
Make a list
Take a few moments, and some deep breaths – and make a list of reasons why youāre amazing! It might help if you look through the eyes of someone else – like your kids, spouse, or parent. It might feel weird at first, as we tend to give compliments WAY better than we receive them. If you get stuck, ask around. Allow yourself to receive the love and kindness of those around you. You can even make it a fun date with yourself, complete with a new set of pens and a cute journal!
See on Amazon
Daydream
Sit back, take a few deep breaths (in to the count of 6, hold for one count, then out to the count of 6) to allow your body to settle. Then dream! What does a ābest day everā in the life of (insert your name here) look like? Take in all the sights, the smells, the tastes. Pay attention to the brand of soap in the bathroom, the thread count on the sheets, the meals. Every detail that you can dream – make a little mental note of it. Then, when you āwake upā: see where you can incorporate your dream life. Maybe itās rearranging the furniture, or making some art, or putting that fancy soap or sheets on your wish list for an upcoming event like your birthday or Christmas if you arenāt able or willing to āsplurgeā on something like that (*yet)
Meditation
You donāt have to be a monk or yogi to meditate. You can take a few minutes when the mood strikes you to focus on your breathing. There are some great apps that you can get for free or maybe a few bucks that have meditations you can have with you on your phone. Or thereās a bunch on YouTube. You can search on specific topics too like abundance, stress relief, etc.
Snuggles
Hugs and snuggles are a great way to feel safe, protected, and loved. Challenge yourself – if itās not usual for you to speak up when you need something – ask for a hug! Ā Itās important to be able to ask for your needs to be met, and not everyone is as intuitive as us ladies at picking up on when someone could use a squeeze.
Allow good enough – to be good enough
If I don’t clean the bathrooms or get the laundry done in a certain period of time (usually that Iāve imposed on myself) itās really NOT the end of the world. We can’t be 100% – 100% of the time. We have to give ourselves credit for all that we DO do, and cut ourselves some slack when we need to. Iām sure we all have things that we beat ourselves up for not doing to the best of our abilities, or at all – (especially we Queens of Multi-tasking). Chances are – the only one beating us up – is US! Ā Give yourself some room to be āgood enoughā. Perfect doesnāt exist.
Find on Amazon
Say NO
We tend to take on WAAAAAY more than we can/should, right?! We will take on everyone elses crap plus our own then wonder why we’re exhausted – or be resentful that we took it on in the first place. When you say āNOā – youāre honoring yourself by taking care of you first. Maybe it’s saying no to a weekend event because you’d rather catch up on some sleep (naps!!!). Maybe it’s someone asking you to bring a homemade goodie and you say no, but offer to bring something store bought.
PS you don’t have to be rude – you can say no thank you š
Start your day on the right track
How do you start your day? If itās full of stress and disorganization – flip it up – List a few things you’re grateful for, as well as some of the emotions you want to create and/or give to the world today.
Itās far from selfish to take care of you.
Even on airplanes they say you have to put the mask on yourself first.
While I have other financial priorities now (like my 16 year old with driverās education and the increased insurance rates of having a new driver) – Iāve learned that I also have to prioritize ME.
My $8/week core class at the local gym and $10-15 a week for a ārealā yoga class are things I can do for myself without breaking the bank. On the weeks where I donāt get to class, or thereās an unexpected expense or Iām just not up to it – I rely on the activities Iāve shared above.
by Mark Garro | Inspirational, Thrifty Tips
Financial freedom sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? The thought of never again having to set up autopayments or worry about what bill is due when…Ahhh-mazing.
That said, have you ever thought about the benefits of financial freedom BEYOND just freedom with your finances?
Well today we’ve got Jacob from Dollar Diligence to introduce us to the non-financial benefits of financial freedom —
The Non-Financial Benefits of Financial Freedom
Being $25,000 in student debt, I knew I was feeling the strain and the anxiety. I hadnāt experienced a good nightās sleep in months and felt drained of energy on most days. I wasnāt completely hopeless, but I felt constrained by the enormity of the problem.
The damage my debt was doing to my finances and credit was clear, because I monitored it almost daily. But, what wasnāt so clear was the damage it was doing to me and those around me. The stress, coupled with my inability to concentrate on much of anything else, led to a deterioration of my health, my relationships and my career.
Getting free of debt not only gave me my financial freedom, it saved my career, and it probably saved my life.
Everything began to turn around for me when I got serious and developed a plan. I freelanced for extra income, I refinanced to a lower rate, and I setup auto-pay for weekly debt killing payments. Just having a plan gave me a sense of relief and the ability to focus, prioritize and make decisions. After 15 months, I am debt free.
Financially Iām not yet where I want to be, but I now have a clear path to achieving my most important goals.Ā Itās a feeling like no other. Ā While the financial benefits of becoming debt-free are clear, less clear, but much more important, are the non-financial benefits. When you understand how debt impacts every corner of your life, it becomes your most powerful motivation to eliminate it completely.
The Physical Reality of Debt
You feel it first in your emotional makeup. Itās hard to ignore the feelings of stress, anxiety and depression, but you feel as if you can cope with it. What you donāt realize is the physical toll it takes. Studies show that stress is a leading cause of heart disease and researchers have found a positive correlation between debt-induced stress and heart attacks.
When I was at the peak of my distress, my family forced me to get a physical. I found out I was a hypertensive time bomb that needed immediate disarming. I long ignored the migraines, the weight gain and the new age lines ā all stress-induced. When I got rid of my debt, I got my health back.
Debt Can Hollow Out Your Life
While your mental and physical health deteriorate under the weight of debt, everything else that is important in your life seems to fade into the background ā your family, your relationships, your career and your future.
When you canāt concentrate on anything other than your finances, nothing is prioritized. It doesnāt happen deliberately; it just happens.
You grow distant from the people close to you and there is no urgency in your relationships at home or at work. Some people become resentful of others ā their spouse for not understanding or being able to help, their employer for not paying enough and anyone who is enjoying a debt-free life.
Debt threatened my relationships, my career and my future. When I became debt-free, I got my life back.
Finding the True Meaning of Wealth
At the risk of drawing any comparisons between eliminating debt and surviving some real life and death situation, I did gain a similar sense of appreciation of everything around me.
There are so many moments of wealth that occur in our lives that, when weāre lost in a fog of despair, we miss entirely. Wealth is as much about accumulating these moments of love and happiness as it is accumulating vast sums of money.
Itās also about being able to choose how you want to live your life ā free to pursue your passion with peace-of-mind and no encumbrances. All of that is lost when you canāt see past a stack of bills. When I became debt-free, I became a very wealthy man.
It may seem hopeless at times, but there are great rewards awaiting you for taking a stand against your debt, the least of which is your financial freedom. When you understand how much is taken from you when debt controls your life, there is no greater feeling than making that last payment.
