$8k wedding: Food

The trickiest part of the $8k budget is definitely feeding everyone. With $4000 (according to my budget breakdown) that comes to $40 per head, including drinks. One certainly can cater one's own wedding, but I know it would do my head in. Plus it feels like cheating given that I'm trying to prove how far the money can stretch.
So I pretty much just googled caterers in WA for a bit and found that, for my town hall wedding, one can get a catered spit-roast with two kinds of meat and loads of different salad and veges for $18 per person. This was certainly down at the cheaper end of the range of prices I found, but there were a few caterers playing with this number, and it certainly wasn't the lowest price I found. Sure, it isn't the most glam option, but it's good hearty food that will fill everyone up, and it certainly has a homey, retro feel.

For the backyard wedding? What's more casual and Italian (and delicious) than woodfired pizza?


Cicciobella are a Perth-based mobile pizza oven company that offer three courses (calzone, all you can eat pizza, and dessert pizza) for a smidge over $20 per person. Brilliant!

Either options leaves you with $10 - 20 per person for drinks (depending on how much wiggle room you want to leave for contingencies). Counting one bottle of wine per person (go see the Dan Murphy's drinks calculator for a better estimate), and assuming you buy at LiquorLand or Vintage Cellars and get 30% off by buying by the dozen, you will be serving up some not shabby drinks!

Tip: Got rellies flying in from overseas for the wedding? Ask them to bring in their duty-free allowance in vodka and make up a big fruit punch for your town hall wedding, or mix it up with some red wine for sangria for your backyard (Spanish-)Italian do.

$8k wedding: Invitations

Now that we have a venue to inform the feel of the wedding, it's time for invites! Print-at-home is your friend. Failing that (or in preference to that, if you want to print on thicker card, or want the colours to look really lush) you take your stuff to a printing centre like KwikCopy. To be honest, I can only make an educated guess about the cost of printing colour papergoods at a print centre, but I am guessing you'd be looking at a couple of hundred dollars to do your invites plus a little more (rsvps, menus or thankyou cards, maybe?).

And etsy is so very much the place to look for your invitations. There are loads of simply stunning options for pdf-downloads to print at home. I think this would be perfect for the retro town hall dance wedding:

Country Fair printable invites by SugarFlowerDesign

And maybe this one for the casual-elegant Italian do?

Monogram printable wedding set by EmPaper

If either of these are busting the budget, I even found this lovely monogrammed, flourished printable set for $15!

$8K wedding: the venue

When you're playing with a tight budget, your choices of venue drop right down. You might need to be a little more flexible about the vibe of your wedding, and because you're going to have limited choices, I think the venue should inform the theming, rather than choosing the other way around. So, what options are there?

First, and most obviously: the backyard. Maybe yours, maybe your folks, maybe your extended family, maybe even friends (my mum's friend was so very eager to have our wedding reception in her backyard). Ask around, you never know who might be willing to put their hand up. And a backyard can be a fairly blank slate, so I'm going to run with a sort of elegant-casual Italian kind of vibe for my imaginary backyard wedding.

Sometimes, though, there just isn't the option of a backyard. Lord knows most of the people I know have nothing larger than a courtyard, if that, these days. And that is where the local hall comes in. Scout around and look at lots of local government websites. They can be a complete bargain. Like this:

Image from the Art Deco Buildings blog.

The Guildford Town Hall. A late-deco beauty that will set you back the grand sum of $256 to hire for your wedding reception. Seriously. And that includes tables and chairs. And yes, it is as pretty inside as out. The feel? A retro village dance, yes? Yes.

(for the record, I think the Gidgegannup Town Hall is also terribly, terribly cute).

Imaginary $8k wedding

Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to catch my first ever episode of Four Weddings (the Australian version). And while all the weddings had their goods bits and their not-so-good, the one that really stuck with me was the afternoon tea reception wedding, with a cash bar. The entire wedding was done on an $8000 budget. Now I am certainly not out to lay in to that wedding - it was a lovely idea, and the bride and groom really enjoyed themselves. But I couldn't help but think that $8k could have gone a lot further than party pies in the mid-afternoon.*

So, I'm using my Mad Wedding Planning Skillz to plan two imaginary weddings with different feels, each being for 100 guests, for $8000 (AUD). I started with a budget breakdown I found here:

Wedding Expense	%
Reception (venue & catering)	40
Attire & Accessories	10
Photography / Video	10
Flowers	10
Ceremony	5
Rings	5
Entertainment	4
Cake	2
Invitations	2
Transportation	2
Miscellaneous	10
Total %	100

but it needs tweaking. I think 50% on the reception is more like it. Nothing will be spent on transport, or 'entertainment' (what is that, and why is it so pricey?), giving me a little more wiggle room on attire and invitations. Flowers will be scaled right back, but that 10% will probably go towards decorating the reception venue more generally. I think realistically you won't get a celebrant or a church for under $500, so let's call the ceremony 10% of the budget, shall we?

So, let the games begin!

* Of course, I am assuming that one wants something other than party pies in the mid-afternoon. If that's your idea of the perfect shindig, please don't let my posts be interpreted as rain on your parade!