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Here's how we were able to set a relatively low budget and stick to it throughout the wedding planning process. I thought it would be helpful to share some of the budget wedding tips we discovered along the way. Even though our budget was higher than I anticipated (trust me, I don't take $10,000 lightly), I had to take into consideration that we live in a top destination wedding city and the price of everything was inflated. I think our wedding planning was a success and I couldn't be happier with the outcome. If you have any other wedding tips, let me know in a comment below! If you are interested in getting a credit card to help with wedding expenses, here are a few I recommend! Chase Sapphire Preferred ($500 back when you spend $4000): https://applynow.chase.com/FlexAppWeb/renderApp.do?SPID=FNLC&CELL=63HB&MSC=1538838942 Chase Ink Preferred ($800 back when you spend $5000) https://applynow.chase.com/FlexAppWeb/renderApp.do?SPID=FP3F&CELL=63HB&MSC=1541377109 Chase Sapphire Reserve (Currently $500 back when you spend $4000) https://creditcards.chase.com/a1/sapphire/reserve Follow me on social! Twitter (@Cliftonmcdnl) http://www.Twitter.com/Cliftonmcdnl Instagram (@Cliftonmcdnl) http://www.instagram.com/Cliftonmcdnl Facebook http://www.Facebook.com/CliftonMcDaniel #RyeWhiskey
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Lucky for us, we're both guys, so we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding dress
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Yay us! Hey guys! So I mentioned in a previous video that I was thinking about making a video about
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having a wedding on a budget, and a lot of you seem interested in the topic. So now that the
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wedding is out of the way, all of the debts have been settled, I figured I would make a video on
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it now and kind of talk through my process and hopefully help you out because lord knows having
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a wedding isn't cheap. And the thought of it is really overwhelming at first, but if you break it
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down piece by piece, it's actually not that bad. So I got married at the end of May to my fiance
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He's been in a couple of my videos and we kind of did like a boyfriend tag thing. But the very first
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step to planning a wedding is setting a budget. And I know that's like the scariest part, but I'm
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really thankful that I set one in the beginning because I actually was able to stick to it the
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entire process. So before you can set a budget, you need to really like research the cost of like
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venues and food and beverage in your area. Unfortunately and fortunately at the same time
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I live in a really popular tourist wedding city. I'm in Charleston, South Carolina
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So weddings aren't cheap. They're a huge business here but your venue and your food and beverage cost
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is your biggest expense. At least it wasn't our experience. Since we live in like one of the
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wedding capitals of the world we set our budget at $10,000. Now that probably sounds like a huge
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amount. It did to me too but based on just what the average cost is it's actually pretty low. Now
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Now if you're planning a wedding that's like a lot smaller than this, this advice will still be relevant to you so don't like click out of it like
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oh $10,000 wedding. It all depends on what you're comfortable with. So the second thing you have to do of course is to decide on a date and reserve your venue as soon as possible
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Also be sure not to set the date on a holiday that people visit with family The first date that we had in mind was like the Saturday before Easter and we didn realize it was Easter the next day So I was like oh crap that would not work out well
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So after you think you've decided on a date, check with the people that you know must be
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there, your parents, your bridesmaids or whatever, and make sure that date works for them because
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it would suck to plan a date and they're like, oh, I'm actually already have another wedding
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that weekend or something. So just verify with the essential people that that date works for them
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Then once you've decided on a date, put down a deposit on your venue. I think it's super important to get that out of the way to begin with because you don't
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have to stress about like, is it going to be available? So once you find out that the venue is available and it's on your date, you're set
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Next up, I would suggest comparing different caterers and bar options. So we found a caterer that we really, really loved and it kind of worked within our budget
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It was a little high, but their bar services and their beverage prices were just kind of
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way outside of what we saw on other sites. So we found a caterer that specialized in like cocktails and beverages and they had really good prices
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So we went to our food caterer and we're like, hey, we would love your food
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But we found this other company that has really good prices on their bar services and they actually match their price and their specialty drinks, which was awesome
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I think it makes it a lot easier for them to plan and less planning for us
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So the next tip comes with a little bit of a warning and it kind of depends on, you know, how you are financially
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I recommend checking out what credit cards have really good signup bonuses at the time
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My thought process was you're going to spend the money anyways, so why not earn rewards while you're doing it
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So I got two cards. I got the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which had 100,000 bonus points at the time, and the Chase Sapphire Preferred, which was 50,000
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So combined you had to spend 4 on each of the cards but you got a bonus 150 points which equaled to about of travel which spending 8 getting 2 plus back I mean that a pretty good deal It like giving yourself a free honeymoon basically
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Check out the description. I'll put links down there to the cards I recommend. And this has kind of been like a newfound hobby of mine
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So if you're interested in learning more about like maximizing credit card rewards, let me know
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I would love to make a video of the topic. I just know for some people, that would be kind of like not that interesting
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So my next tip is to enlist the help of your friends and family as much as possible
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You don't want to spend money that you don't have to In my case, my cousin is actually a wedding DJ and officiant
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And same thing, we didn't really actually need a professional like videographer or photographer the actual ceremony
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So I got my other cousin and my uncle to take candid photos and which came out great
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And along with that one thing we did was we did a pre-wedding photo shoot
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So the day before the wedding when we already had our tuxes rented we met with a photographer for a couple hours and took a lot of pictures around the Charleston area
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and these came out amazing I'm going to put some examples up here it was so much more affordable
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to do this versus have him at the wedding you know pay for multiple hours of coverage and when
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you combine these like really professional beauty shots with candid shots from the wedding it's
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really kind of cool and you save a lot of money and lastly you don't need everything we see all
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the time these tens of thousands of dollar weddings on the internet and on tv but really
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you don't need all that. People remember the food, the drinks, how good of a time they had with you
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They don't remember the small details that a lot of times cost a lot of money, especially once you put the label wedding on it
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because everything becomes like 10 times more expensive when it's like wedding flowers or wedding photographer or whatever
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The day's all about you. Your friends are there to see you. They not there to see your crazy expensive decorations So our final budget ended up looking like this So for 60 people we spent about on the food and beverage I know that a lot but again it Charleston
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We spent about $2,500 on the venue because it's right downtown. It just was the perfect location
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for us. It's a lot higher than we intended to spend on a venue, but it worked out great for us
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and our guests. The photographer for the pre-photo session was only $600 compared to thousands of
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for like a wedding package. The DJ, which was my cousin, ended up giving us a really good discount
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and it was only $500 for him to do the whole night and also officiate the wedding. So it ended up
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being a lot cheaper than other options. We spent about $500 on flowers and this was mainly the
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centerpieces on each of the tables. By the way, I had no idea how expensive wedding flowers are
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Thank God I didn't just like line the aisles with flowers because that would have been crazy expensive. And finally, we spent about $200 on the invitations and saved the dates. So that total
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comes out to $9,300. And of course, I'm probably forgetting a lot of things like small decorations
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and stuff. So it probably adds up really, really close to the $10,000 budget we set. So I think we
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actually did pretty amazing. We weren't really following the budget the entire time, but we just
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kind of had it in the back of our minds. And I'm really happy with the outcome. Obviously, you don't
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have to spend $10,000 on a wedding. You don't have to spend like $5,000 on a wedding. You can have it
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with just a small gathering with a group of friends, but I knew I had a lot of people coming from out of town, so I wanted to make this a really special night for them and for us
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of course. So hopefully this was helpful for some of you, whether you're planning a wedding now
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or daydreaming about your wedding in the future. Just know that it's totally possible to do a wedding on any budget
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Have confidence. Just do your research ahead of time and you'll be totally fine. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next video
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Bye. you
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