One of the other smaller incremental costs of a wedding is in the invitations. If you’re inviting 100 people and each invitation costs $5, that’s a $500 expense that you can’t spend on something else. If the invitations cost $10, that’s a cool thousand bucks (plus how much it costs to mail them) you can’t spend on your wedding. As with any other incremental per person cost, the key to make some trade-offs so you can get what you want and still stay within budget.

The easiest way to lower the cost of invitations is to do it yourself. Home printers are sophisticated enough to produce high quality invitations and all it takes is a trip to the local office supply store for paper, envelopes, etc. There are plenty of resources online for you to lean on for ideas and instructions.

If you don’t want to print it yourself, you can always print part of the invitation and assemble it yourself. In our case, we had a square card printed, because we wanted a particularly delicate design, and then bought some red card stock and some glue sticks from Michael’s to assemble the invitation ourselves.

The last and most expensive option, since you won’t be trading your labor for cost, is to have the entire package printed and assembled. While it will be more expensive, it is one less thing on your plate at a time when you’ll likely be planning the biggest event of your life. It’s better to manage the costs on the front end than be stressed out and make a costly mistake later.