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Since getting engaged, I’ve joined a bunch of wedding planning Facebook groups, and have looked up wedding related content on TikTok, Pinterest and elsewhere. I’ve been pretty surprised to learn that wedding culture seems to vary pretty grately! I come from a large family and have attended a ton of weddings in my life. As a result, I thought my idea of a ‘nice wedding’ would be the same as most other people’s in the US. 

It turns out that isn’t necessarily the case. Some people grow up only attending extremely expensive weddings. When their own budget doesn’t match the budget needed for a high end wedding, they come to these groups asking “Is there any way I can have a wedding for under 20k? That’s the most I can afford” or similar questions but with 15k, 10k or 5k as the budget instead. 

The answer is yes, it is possible, even as we’re ending out 2024. Like the cost of housing and food, the cost of various wedding related expenses increased around 2020 or 2021. So yes, weddings today are more expensive than they were in 2019 and before…but it’s still possible to have a wedding for under $5,000. Here is how to make it happen. 

1. Prep Your Own Food Instead Of Catering. 

Most of my suggestions are in a random order, but skipping catering is #1 for a reason. It can easily save you thousands, making it a key way to have a wedding for under $5k. It blows me away how common it is for people to spend thousands of dollars on catering even when they’re really trying to stick to a smaller budget. Many in groups that I am in see having catering as a requirement so their goal is to find the cheapest catering possible. Even the cheapest catering is significantly more expensive than prepping your own food. We’re estimating around $4 a plate for our reception food that family is helping prep. 

It also has surprised me how common it is for people to want a bigger wedding, but to have a microwedding just to save on the cost of food. I don’t mean to suggest there’s anything wrong with a microwedding, but if you’d like to have a bigger wedding and just can’t afford $20 a plate for 50+ people, then prepping your own food is the way to go. Catering is also the reason why many feel they can’t invite children to their wedding. If you take out the cost of catering, the additional expense involved with inviting more people (whether adults or children) is usually minimal. 

Prepping your own food can mean you personally cooking the food a day or two ahead, and then reheating it in crockpots or buffet style food warmers. Or if you have a family member or friend who can prep the food, that can make a great wedding gift from them! In my family it’s common for the parents of the bride and groom or other close relatives to help prep the food. Potluck weddings are also becoming more common from what I’ve seen in some wedding groups. 

2. Use Fake Flowers Rather Than Real Flowers. 

It’s common for floral shops to have a minimum spend of 2k or 3k when ordering for a wedding! Even just ordering a bridal bouquet can be a few hundred dollars. In wedding planning groups, many talk about how impressed they are with the look of fake flowers from sites like Temu and Shein. Others utilize the regular sales and coupons available at craft stores like Michaels or Hobby Lobby to get their fake flowers at a great price. 

Another option for fake flowers is sola wood flowers. I am using sola flowers for my wedding. You can buy flowers in your choice of colors or you can buy undyed wood flowers and dye them yourself. I dyed my own because it’s quite a bit cheaper than ordering specific colors. It was a fair amount of work, but we had a fun day dyeing my flowers! I love that they will last forever so we can keep one of the bouquets as decor for our home. They are dyed using acrylic paint mixed with water and acrylic paint can be purchased for around $0.50 a bottle so I bought several bottles in different shades of purple for just a few dollars! 

Ps – you’ll need a hot glue gun to secure sola flowers to a stem. I was sent a Surebonder hot glue kit and it worked great! They even have colored glue if you want to coordinate the colors. 

3. Buying an Affordable Suit Instead of Renting. 

I’ve posted about my review of COOFANDY suits from Amazon in the past. You can get a full suit for under $150. By that I mean a jacket, vest, shirt and pants purchased separately! Then they’re yours to keep, rather than needing to be returned within a day or two. In the past I have paid over $200 to rent a suit for just one day and it was not well fitted. When you buy a suit, you can have it tailored perfectly to your groom or groomsmen. In our case, the shirt is a solid white dress shirt and the pants are black dress pants so they’ll get additional wear in the future as well. However, even if you do just use yours one time it can save you $50 or more per person. 

Ryan’s COOFANDY suit before it was fitted 

4. Use An Affordable Venue

In wedding groups I’ve commented suggesting looking for ‘non-venue venues”! By this I mean, go looking for places to get married and have your reception that aren’t listed on your area’s “top venues” articles or high ranking on TheKnot. Places that exist solely to be wedding venues are WAY more expensive than most other places you can get married. In some cases, choosing a free or cheap venue can be the top way to save thousands on your wedding! 

I’ve seen people say things like “Why are there no venues under $3k?” and the truth is, there are tons! For example, many churches allow ceremonies for free, and some allow use of a meeting room for free or very low price as well. Other options for free ceremony locations include public parks, or someone’s backyard. I’ve also seen people rent an AirBNB or VRBO location that has a nice yard just to have their wedding in the yard. For receptions, a VFW hall or banquet hall can often be rented for a couple hundred dollars per day. 

We are getting married at a building that used to be a church but was donated to the township several years ago. They rent it out for weddings and other events, and it has a chapel area as well as a kitchen and dining room. We weren’t wanting to have dancing or a traditional reception anyway, so this location allows us to have a ceremony plus a meal and social hour all in one space – and for $150! Plus, we get it for the entire weekend while many locations that are exclusively wedding venues will only rent you the space for 1 day or even part of a day, which pressures people into paying for a decorator and cleanup crew if they don’t have the time to decorate or clean up themselves in the hours or day before and after their wedding. 

Other locations to look up for your ceremony or reception include local campgrounds, botanical gardens, a local beach, community centers, college campuses (especially if one or both of you are alumni), orchards, vineyards, sports facilities off season, etc. 

5. Use a Local Independent Seamstress Rather Than a Bridal Shop Seamstress

It’s not uncommon to see stories in wedding groups of how brides bought a $400 dress at a local bridal shop and made an appointment to have it fitted without questioning the cost. Then once they’re ready to pay for their fitted dress, they learn that the alterations cost more than the dress itself! I’ve seen people post about being charged over $1,000 for alterations to their dress. 

6. Skip Alcohol or Have a Cash Bar

When the coupe pays for an open bar, this often results in their alcohol tab being one of their top 5 expenses! I’ve seen people post alcohol bills of over $5k! So, either choosing to skip alcohol entirely or having a cash bar so that your guests buy their own drinks can save thousands so this will go a long way to helping you have a wedding for less than $5k. Or if you want an in-between option, some have receptions where they give out drink tickets so that each adult guest is provided with 1 or 2 free drinks, and then any additional drinks they’d have to pay for out of their own pocket. If you want to provide free alcoholic drinks to your guests while having control of how big the tab gets, providing a specific amount of paid for drinks can be a good way to go about that. 

A $800 dress I tried on locally. Pretty, but not worth paying 4x as much for in my opinion. 

7. Buy Your Dress Online. 

Many people are understandably worried about buying clothing online, especially such a special item! I have heard that there are a lot of spammy or scammy wedding dress sites out there, so I definitely recommend being cautious about which website(s) you order from. However, there are plenty of legitimate wedding dress websites that exist, and they often offer dresses at a fraction of the cost of many dresses from bridal shops. 

I didn’t want to worry about shipping, so I stuck with buying dresses from Amazon (and limited myself to ones that said they had free shipping and free returns), and Shein as I knew they both are really easy to do returns with. I found that some of the dresses I ordered to try were really low quality and/or were different from what the listing said, so I returned those. Others felt really high quality, to where I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference in quality from those dresses to ones in the local bridal shops that I visited. I like lace, and I found that most bridal shops have some dresses under $500 or even some under $300 but they tend to be solid satin or similar, rather sleek and classic dresses. Which are gorgeous, but just not my style. When looking at dresses with a lot of lace, I didn’t find any that were under $700 in local shops. Online, I found multiple for under $200 that I loved. So, I saved over 75%! 

8. Use A Sheetcake or Cupcakes Rather Than a Large Traditional Wedding Cake

Large wedding cakes with multiple tiers are far more expensive than sheet cakes or cupcakes. This is due to 3+ tier cakes requiring a lot more skill on the bakers behalf. Which makes sense! However, if you want to provide enough cake for all of your 100+ guests, yo udon’t need a 4 tier cake. Instead you can use a small (two tier) wedding cake that you cut and use to display, and supplement it with a sheet cake or cupcakes. 

A lot of people in budget friendly wedding groups reference using two tier cakes from sams club, costco or Walmart and supplementing it with sheet cakes or cupcakes from the same locations. Compared to a 3+ tier wedding cake, this can save you at least a few hundred dollars, perhaps more. 

9. Skip the DJ, Use a Playlist! 

If you plan to have music and dancing at your reception, you can use a Spotify playlist or similar to play a list of pre-selected music without needing to pay for a DJ. Of course, this is only if you are okay with not having someone announce certain dances, or do other announcements that the DJ would typically do. It also means that you would need someone to manually pause the playlist to play any special songs at the right time, such as your first dance song and the father/daughter or mother/son dances.

Another consideration would be to include some of the really engaging songs in a secondary playlist. DJ’s often play ordinary music for a while, and then if too many people start leaving the dance floor they will play a song like the chicken dance, YMCA, the chacha slide as those types of songs tend to draw people back onto the dance floor for a while. 

If you’re open to this, you can save $1,000 or more as DJ’s often cost around $1,000 for the night. When looking to have a wedding under five thousand, you likely can’t afford to have more than a couple of things cost 1k or more. 

10. Skip the Bachelor and Bachelorette Trips

In recent years, it’s become common for people to have a bachelor trip and/or bachelorette trip with their friends rather than just having a night out. These often result in everyone flying to another city for the weekend. This can cost a couple thousand dollars or more. If you instead opt for a traditional ‘night on the town’ or just skipping the party altogether, you can save a lot of money. 

11. Do Your Own Makeup

I paid to have my makeup done professionally when I was a bridesmaid in another wedding. My makeup did not last throughout the day. Granted, it was a really hot day but I was still disappointed at having spent good money on a face of makeup that didn’t hold up! 

I am not particularly skilled at doing makeup, but I know what products work for me and my skintype, so I will be doing my own makeup and it’ll save me money as I’ll be using products I already own and/or will fully use rather than just wear once. 

Part of what I’ll be wearing is MyChelle 3-in-1 SuperSerum in light/medium. This has been my go-to product for evening out my skinstone. Basically meaning I have been using this instead of a foundation, or CC cream. I am fairly light skinned (sometimes ‘fair’ and sometimes ‘light’ in different cosmetics) so I was a little worried that the light/medium version would be too dark on me. I also have very neutral undertones, so it’s easy for various skin cosmetics to show up too yellow or too pink on me. This builds really nicely and I’m able to get a really natural match. My skin is dry and I have some fine lines and it doesn’t settle or separate. I love how it leaves me with a natural look while covering some of my imperfections. 

For blush, I’ll be using the M2U NYC hydrating liquid blush. I have dry skin so powder or even cream blushes can add texture to my skin. I love how this liquid blush can so easily be adjusted based on how much you use and whether you use it over or under your foundation (or in my case, tinted moisturizer). Plus it’s vegan, cruelty-free and the brand uses clean ingredients! These add a lovely color while looking really nice on my skin. 

Emily

Hi there! I am Emily Evert, the owner of Emily Reviews. I am 28 and live in a small town in Michigan with my boyfriend Ryan and our two pugs. I have a large family and I adore my nieces and nephews. I love reading memoirs, and learning about child development and psychology. I love watching The Game of Thrones, Teen Mom, Sister Wives and Veep. I like listening to Jason Isbell, John Prine, and other alt-country or Americana music. I created Emily Reviews as a creative outlet to share my life and the products that I love with others.

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