Once you get engaged to the person that God has blessed you, you will start thinking on how to start the planning process for the upcoming wedding. Believe me, you will be too overwhelmed that you won't even know where to start. Time will be your greatest ally because proper planning will make your wedding more customized and you won't have to rush to other things that would unnecessarily affect your budget.
In this techy generation, you will always have the internet at your back. And that's how i met PINTEREST.
It helped me and my husband to narrow down our preferences to come up with a theme and color motif.
In our case, we had 6 months of research and conceptualizing what we want for our wedding. 😊
Now, too much ideas might make your journey to wedding planning seem so complicated. Good thing I found: Mindly. An organizing app that you can use for sorting out all your ideas.
All of these fun ideas will be put to waste if we will not consider the two main factors for planning a wedding: BUDGET and GUEST LIST.
I am blessed to have a husband who have the same mindset in terms of both the budget and the number of people to invite in the occasion. We pulled off an outdoor wedding with an expense of around 200,000-300,000php and an estimate of 300-350 guests.
For our budget, at first we made a target of 100,000php for around 150 guests but half a year was gone in planning when we realized that we need to increase our budget in order to accomodate most of our immediate family (we both have big families). So i have to calculate again and adjust the target of our savings to 200,000php in the end of the year. The rest of the expense was paid by the monetary gifts given to us after the wedding that's why we consider our expenses to be more than 200,000php.
Believe me, it takes a lot of hard work and help from the family. A lot of sacrifices had been made to achieve a frugal yet customized wedding not only to showcase our love and introduce each other to both our families but to honor our God who put us together as one.
It was a no brainer that we will do the ceremony in our church (where my husband was molded to be a God loving man that he is now). Take note that it cost us nothing for the ceremony venue itself.
Because we are both Christians, I did lots of reseach on how to incorporate our faith and to showcase God's love for us in the wedding. So, we made a big thank you note with a bible verse at the bottom and some wooden signs leading to the reception area using bible verses.
My sister in law even made table names using the fruits of the Holy Spirit in the bible but we decided during the last minute not to use it as there was a change of plan in the table setting.
I couldn't put in words how THANKFUL i am to my husband's family especially his sisters who did not get much sleep days before the wedding just to finish all those details for the wedding. Thank God I have new talented sisters.
Even my parents' frontyard was upgraded just for the wedding. It was my husband's idea to use my parents' huge and plain frontyard for the reception (I was originally thinking of using my grandmother's frontyard which was a little bit smaller but already usable). It's like hitting two birds with one stone. I was able to put some outdoor areas in our yard for future gatherings (with the help of my sister who is an architect) and we can spend the whole day and night in the reception without worrying about rentals for the venue.
Due to our low budget, I had to sacrifice on having a wedding planner (you might know this already) so I was the one doing all the research and organizing ideas (with my husband's opinion) and my eldest sister in law is the main decision maker and lead in the process (she was the one who did that delicious naked wedding cake).
Contrary to most of the advices that we got, we didn't hire a professional photographer/videographer (I really want one but our budget says: "No thanks"). So my other sister in law offered to do the photographer's job and we also purchased a videocam on sale in order to record the event. Thanks to my brother's suggestion, we hired his long time friend who is a student photographer who is much cheaper than the professional one (Thank you Ymir!). He told me that it would be better that we will have a helping hand with the photos as my sister in law is also part of the entourage so she might have difficulty in taking photos at the same time.
After a year of mind boggling planning, it still all comes up with this mindset that I read somewhere in order to have a successful wedding. Whatever may go wrong, take away the stress in those extra details and enjoy the wedding day with your lifetime partner.
"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Mark:10:9
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