Redhead at the Piggy Bank

I just stumbled across this slideshow over at WalletPop. I feel for the guy. He’s a newspaper reporter who accepted a buyout package weeks before his wedding. With no paycheck in sight and the nuptials and a move looming, he and his fiancee managed to cut $13,000 from their wedding budget. I have to admit, that’s pretty impressive.

But I also have to admit that I don’t think I spent $13,000 total on our wedding. Granted, our wedding was in Des Moines, Iowa, and you can’t get a much cheaper locale than that. But our celebration included all the traditional things: Dinner, drinks, dancing, cake, limo, flowers, deejay, and so on. It’s not like we got married in a field of wildflowers with three people as witnesses. And while my parents paid for the reception, we covered most everything else. Our wedding was the September after we graduated from college, so we were making a lot of these down payments while we were students and then during our first few months as New Yorkers. But we made it work and didn’t go into debt over it; we just made some pretty easy choices on what mattered to us and what we could do without:

• Our college friend took our engagement photos, and they turned out great because we had so much fun taking them.
• Mister Redhead’s aunt made our invites, programs, and thank-you’s, and my aunt made the decorations for the church.
• I love calla lilies and wanted my bouquet to be nothing but callas. Then I saw the price estimate and decided I didn’t really love callas at all (although I did get a few in the final bouquet).
• We arrived in Des Moines a couple days before the wedding. Rather than pay for a week at a hotel, we stayed with Mister Redhead’s brother. We slept on an air mattress in our nephew’s bedroom. Between the air mattress and the nephew, I don’t think I slept more than two hours that whole week. Adrenaline, meet wedding day.
• We had a professional photographer at the ceremony and for formal shots, but he didn’t come to the reception. We asked my aunt to do our reception photos instead, and our friends took plenty of pictures during the cake-cutting, toasts, and dancing!
• Our cake did not come from a bakery, and it did not cost hundreds of dollars, but it looked cool and tasted good, so what else matters?
• I love my wedding dress; it was the first one I tried on. Was it from some expensive bridal specialty boutique? No.
• We didn’t take a honeymoon. This was more of a practical choice than a financial one, seeing as we had to travel from Manhattan to Minneapolis to Des Moines for the wedding, then do that trip in reverse to get back to the Big Apple. You couldn’t have paid me enough to add another leg of travel on that trip.

What would/have you cut out of your wedding budgets? What would you do if you lost your job right before the wedding?