One of the struggles you will face when planning you wedding will be between time and money. Weddings are financially expensive and so you’ll feel pressure to cut costs whenever you can. Weddings also take up a considerable amount of time, both in planning and preparations, and so you will need to be careful where you cut costs, where you trade in some of your time in return for savings down the road.

An example of this is in making your own invitations. If you get them entirely printed, they will be more expensive than if you get some of it printed and put it together yourself. The same goes for a lot of the things at the wedding. You have to balance the savings with the effort it takes to achieve them.

Where does the savings make sense? My bar is always my own earnings after taxes. For example, if I earn $10 an hour and I can only save $5 an hour to get something done, then I will pay for it. If I do something myself and I can save $20, then I’ll do it.

That’s a very simplistic view so here’s another wrinkle. Consider the frustration savings. Cutting paper and gluing them together to make invitations is a pretty low stress activity, transporting a cake is more stressful right? Let’s say you told the baker that you’d do the transport to cut a few dollars off the price. You might save more than your salary (plus gas), but you have the stress of transporting the cake in your car. What if something gets messed up? That unknown is stress and is it worth it to save a few dollars? Probably not (depends on how far away it is, how many free hands you have, etc), but that’s ultimately up to you.

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.

When we were looking around at caterers, one of the most surprising things we learned was that your food choices would be more expensive if you gave people the option of what they wanted to eat. That’s right, if you have more than one option, it will end up being more expensive than if you just gave them dual entrees.

At our wedding, we had a dual entree of steak and fish which ended up costing the same having a single entree of steak. The portions were smaller (4 oz. steak and 4 oz. fish rather than a 6 oz. steak) but the cost was the same because it’s so much more expensive for a caterer to factor in choice.

This makes sense though. The food cost is only a small portion of the per place price. The linens, tables, chairs, clothes, and labor make up the bulk of the cost whereas the food is just one static portion. Another reason is because they have to make extra portions for on-the-spot changes. If you have an option, someone who sees their choice as unappetizing will just report a different selection. Those extras have to be factored in and thus drive up the cost.

If you want to save some money on the entree and still give a choice (people can simply indicate they want a double portion of steak if they are allergic to fish), go with a dual entree rather than a choice.We

The catering bill will be the single largest bill of the entire event.

If you want to save money on your wedding, the caterer is where you will want to go and the best way to do that is to get at least three quotes. Dealing with contractors is the same whether you’re talking the catering for a wedding, installing windows, or getting anything done on your house. You won’t know how much you should be paying unless you get at least three quotes. Personally, especially with caterers, you’ll want to get at least five quotes (seven to be sure). While it seems like a lot of work, you’re spending thousands and thousands of dollars on this affair so you should be doing a little more work than usual! (also, you get to sample lots of food)

By getting multiple quotes, you get a general idea of how much things should cost in your area. You’ll know relative things right off that bat (chicken is cheaper than steak, which is cheaper than seafood) but to get your gauge straight you’ll want to get those quotes.

My wife and I were recently married and found a few ways to slim down our wedding costs. Over the next few weeks I’ll post some of the better gems so that all of you bride and grooms to be can take advantage of them. This week, our tip involves buying a small cake and then pairing it with cheaper sheet cakes.

When it comes to your big day, it’s important to get a nice beautiful cake, but it’s not necessary to get a nice big beautiful cake. One way we trimmed down our cake expense was to buy a reasonably sized three-tiered cutting cake and then several sheet cakes for our guests. What eventually happens is that you cut the cutting cake for all your guests to see and then the caterer rushes everything back into the kitchen for cutting.

By using a sheet cake, you cut both costs and time of service. With a sheet cake already prepared in the back, the pieces can be cut and ready to serve almost immediately after they carry away the cutting cake. Had you gone with a larger cutting cake, you would have to wheel it back, cut it, then serve. This cuts down on your guests’ wait time and your costs.