Ep. 38 | 10 Tips for Planning a Wedding Reception on a Budget

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Hello and welcome to The Pixilated Podcast. I'm Patrick Rife.

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and I'm Alex McGlynn,

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and today we're going to talk about planning your wedding reception on a budget.

Right? Yeah. planning your wedding reception on a budget.

0:19
10 if we feel like it. Yeah. All right. All right. So this is really important one. We're also gonna have a later episode about actually working on a budget and how to do it. But the number one thing is to focus your budget on the must haves and spend on those. So obviously, everyone would love to have a fairytale $75,000 wedding. But that's not the reality for most people.

Most people don't have the budget for that. So think about the things that are most important to you and make sure that those are what you focus your budget on. So whether that's the DJ, the band, the food, the alcohol, the venue itself, it doesn't really matter. Make sure that you have your priorities straight on what you're willing to sacrifice and what you're not willing to sacrifice.

0:59
Yeah. Number two, don't be scared of a longer engagement. I know people talk a lot of junk about people that stay engaged too long. And while we're not suggesting that you hold up for three or four years, definitely the longer that you hold out, it gives you more time to source vendors. Find the gaps where the cheap dates and venues happen, maybe they're off nights gaining more information. So the longer that you have to plan it, the more adept you're going to be at planning it and you're gonna get better deals

1:27
on upset. So, next up, finding an awesome, unusual, unexpected, whatever you want to call it out of the box venue by Pixilated. So there's a lot of different places you can get married. I mean, depending on the size of your wedding, I mean, someone's backyard could work. If you have a family member that has like a large farm, something like that. You could do outdoor wedding. Airbnb has a lot of really cool very large, you know, mansion style homes on them that are great for smaller weddings, museums are something that's often overlooked and they're typically a lot cheaper than your traditional wedding venues.

So you don't get out there be be open to new ideas and do your research. Because again, there's a lot of cool wedding venues out there or a lot of spaces that could be wedding venues that don't cost an arm and a leg to to rent and don't have a bunch of mandatory vendors that you have to use, which can really jack up the price for your wedding very quickly.

2:21
Yeah, don't schedule. So number four. Don't schedule your wedding in primetime wedding season. You know, there's no rule that's written that says you have to get married in the last two weeks of the first two weeks of May or June and or September, October. Get creative. think outside of the box. When it comes to your dates. What you're going to find is venues, vendors, everyone involved in the events industry is going to be way more open minded about coming down on their budget if you're looking to book them in a time where they have no work. Whereas if you're looking to book them in a time when they have all the work that they could possibly need. They have no incentive to compromise on their pricing.

3:00
Yeah, absolutely simple economics supply and demand. So next up, limit your wedding guest list. So I'm actually in the middle of planning my wedding and I'm dealing with this myself. It is really easy to have your guest list get bloated to 150 200 200 plus people very quickly. You know, your family members that want to be invited or maybe you're expecting to be invited you haven't talked to in a few years, you know, sit down and really consider who you actually want to be there. There's nothing wrong with having a 50 person wedding. I've been to 50 person weddings, they're great. And you know, it was their closest friends and family and it was still just as amazing as time as it would have been 175 people there. So you know, really think through that. Think about what kind of wedding you want to have even had your fairytale wedding without having 200 people there, I promise.

3:47
Yeah. So number six is thinking about non traditional foods. So certainly, you may have a black tie wedding in mind and there is, you know, like, in your mind, maybe it's past or In your mind, maybe it's a buffet in your mind, maybe it's like a seven core sit down served thing. And for those of you that that is a very important element to your wedding understood, but for those of you that that's not as important, think about non traditional ways that you can feed and, and drink up your guests. catering is a tremendous amount of your wedding budget. And if you can think about some non traditional ways to approach it, you can stand to save an absolutely tremendous amount of money inside of your budget. On the positive side of that your wedding should be about creating fun experiences and create memories and, you know, coming at it from a different point of view and serving people things that they don't expect, whether it's a chicken box in Baltimore, because that's very intimate and part of our perspective and our personality as a city or thinking about you know, having a snowball truck or a food truck or you know, like any kind of other outside of the box ideas, there's a good chance that some of your guests will really appreciate the unconventional nature of it. And they'll find that it's an icebreaker for them. It's a way for them to open up and kind of have a little bit more fun. So being non traditional about choosing your food could end up being your your greatest secret weapon.

5:18
Yeah, absolutely. I've been to a few weddings where they had kind of outside the box food ideas, like food stations, like a taco station, and like a sushi station, and they were actually able able to save a lot of money because they got outside vendors to work together. And it was a really cool experience. I've never been to another wedding like it. I'm sure it took a lot of planning to pull off but they save a ton of money. I'm actually gonna throw a bonus tip in here. So this will end up being 11 and along the same lines of catering, alcohol, so you know your guest list probably better than anyone else, hopefully. Obviously, there's always the option of completely cutting out alcohol but you don't have to do that to save money. a really easy way to to save money on that part of it is to have it separate from your catering contract. So a lot of states will allow you to go buy your own alcohol for your wedding. And you have to get like a one day distributors license. It's super cheap because like 50 bucks, I'm actually doing this for my wedding in Virginia. It's 50 bucks, I'm having an outside bartender come in, and it is about half the cost as it would have been if I went through the cater. So I'm buying out my own alcohol, I can serve whatever I want. And I'm paying an outside bartender to come in and mix all the drinks together. And if I wanted to make it even more budget friendly, I could cut out the mix drinks altogether and go like beer and wine only. So there's a lot of different options out there. That's why also it's really important to be careful when you're choosing your venue. My venue was has is open enough that they don't have any vendor requirements so I can pick whoever I want. And that made it really easy for me to get creative on how the alcohol was going to be served and how I can budget that in a way that was worked for me

6:58
also A lot of your caterers will be willing to still staff bartenders, and how do you supply the alcohol and in addition there to the the big value comes when you have a ton of alcohol that is leftover afterwards, most of the time anything that's not open, you can actually return to the distributor so that you end up not getting stuck with, you know, 60 bottles of extra Tito's, like who would really hate that. Like, truthfully speaking, but you know, point is, maybe you would hate getting stuck with a whole bunch of extra bottles of Chardonnay, because you know, like you're a red drinker or, you know, you don't like sweet white wine or whatever the case may be. So, definitely, that's a huge opportunity to save a ton of money. Yeah, I did, actually. So I did that at my wedding. And what was the tip that was before that was, Oh, no, it's the next tip. This is my turn. So as we've talked about on this podcast before, I have a strong, strong tethered to music, I have a lot of personal interests when it comes to music and When it came time to choose who we were going to have spinning music at our wedding, we didn't really want a DJ that was going to put on Cypress Hill. Because I don't like Cypress Hill. I mean, it's cool, like whatever baseball game like it's fun, but like I don't like Cypress Hill. And I don't like a lot of that. Like I didn't want. I didn't want jurnee played at my wedding. That wasn't what I saw. But I did want some obscure Ethiopian jazz played at my wedding that I love. So what my wife and I did is we chose all of our playlists ourselves. And we created about four to match the different kind of moods as we move through the evening. And then we hired a friend of ours to come in. And we got a mixer and a PA system and loaded all the playlists on the two iPods and just kind of had him do it. And it was really fun and it and ultimately, maybe it didn't have the mixing and some of the other performative elements that you get with a professional DJ which are amazing is not to undercut them but sometimes you're dealing on a budget and a great way to do that is you Creating your own lists, having somebody help you kind of organize it, like even so far is creating playlists and putting them on shuffle and then asking your mom Mom, like at 715. When we move from this to this, pause it and then five minutes later, go to the next playlist, very simple, easy way to save a lot of money.

9:16
Yeah. And like we said earlier, if you're really into having the idea of having a wedding band, like it's going to be expensive, just know that going in. And if that's something you're not willing to budge on, work around it. No. But yeah, I mean, again, also DJs are amazing, but there's really easy ways to do music on a budget, that's still really cool. And if you have an eclectic tastes like Pat, you're probably not going to find a DJ that has that music in their wheelhouse. Anyway, Ethiopian jazz, not on everyone's playlist. Also, quick plug, check out our playlist on Spotify and hear more of Pat's very interesting taste in music. You won't be disappointed.

9:48
We should do an Ethiopian, that'll be the theme. Next,

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making flowers part of the background knowledge Highlight. So if you want to talk about something get out of hand very quickly. wedding flowers, they're always beautiful. We love our florist friends, they do amazing work. They will tell you this themselves when you go to meet with them. You have two options or three options with flowers. You can either go really over the top and it's going to be very expensive and you're into the floral patterns and you want a lot of flowers. Again, budget around it. If you're not if you don't care as much. You can save a ton of money by pulling back on what you're doing for your centerpieces at your table. What kind of floral decorations are going to be around the the wedding ceremony itself. You know who gets it okay and who doesn't, whether your groomsmen will have boutonnieres if you make your own centerpieces and just have them add the floral aspects later. There's a lot of different ways to save money there. My recommendation would be to be really honest with your florist about your budget. They work with everything from thousand dollar weddings all the way up to $15,000 weddings in terms of the budget for flowers. So be honest with them about what you're looking for. They'll help you and then again, Pinterest is gonna be your best friend there.

11:06
Yeah. And also the flower vendors, florists. You know, they realize that there are all types of people out there. So you know, one of the things that we did was we worked with the florists but we bought all the stuff in bulk from them all the flowers and walk and then we assembled everything ourselves. And it was like a something that my wife and her bridesmaids, they made part of their day of activity, like when they were hanging out doing their thing. They were kind of working on a project together. And yeah, like, again, it ends up being an awesome inflection point for the time that they shared together on on that day. Absolutely. Yeah. So as you may have heard in a previous episode, but another big opportunity is getting creative about how you hire a photographer for your event. So I would recommend for all of the ideas to just go back a few episodes and listen to our episode on on opportunities to find non traditional photographers. To cover your event, but some kind of that popped to mind immediately is finding a student photographer, finding an amateur photographer that's looking to build their portfolio or even using like a simple solution like PixiWeb, to be able to crowdsource photos from all of your attendees that they're taking on their mobile phones.

12:18
Yeah, and to dovetail right off of that, creating a shared photo gallery, or photo booth, or whatever to capture the event, as opposed to having a wedding photographer during the reception itself. So this is something we actually didn't cover in the last episode that I think is important. If you really want those traditional high quality photos of you with your, your bridal party, you can hire your photographer to just do the wedding ceremony and do the pictures of the bridal party together. You don't necessarily need to pay for the three or four or five hours of your wedding reception. That's gonna be a ton of added expense, and sometimes it's worth it and sometimes it's not. It's just really what's important to you, but If it's not important to you, then a really easy way to save money on the wedding reception is to have everyone. encourage everyone to take photos with their phones, give them Polaroid cameras to snap photos with. There's a lot of other really cool ways. PixiWeb is one of them to get people to take photos and then share them to the same drive or the same event gallery, and then have it kind of crowdsourced as opposed to paying a professional to walk around your wedding reception to take pictures of people dancing.

13:28
Yeah, definitely. So I want to double back on this really quickly and just say that we realize that there is no substitution for true professionals for a lot of these things. For the ultimate di wire, you might want to work through our entire list and see how low you can create your budget and for you, that's great. For more of a general person, there are probably some things on this list that are really important that they're done a certain way and there's probably some things on this list that they would be okay with a little bit More of a DIY option. So what we seek to do is just to provide a lot of different ways to think about how if DJ isn't important to you, or beverages aren't as important to you some workarounds that you can have more than likely, you know, you're going to use one or two of these things, and it's going to help you reduce your budget incrementally and maybe not guillotine kind of the entire thing. So definitely keep that in mind. No disrespect to wedding professionals. We're wedding professionals ourselves. And we realize that there are services that you just can't shortchange on when they're important to you. So that brings us to the end of today's episode. Before you go, if you could remember to rate review and subscribe. Your reviews help us find a broader listener base for our podcasts, and they also ensure that you get notified each time we publish a new episode. So without further ado, I'm Patrick Rife

and I'm Alex McGlynn

peace.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai