Frugal Valentine gifts are a great way to show your love without breaking the bank. Occasions like Valentine’s Day are a retailer’s dream, designed to encourage consumers to spend lots of money on cards, flowers, meals out, and hotel stays.

However, for those of us without much money to spare these occasions can feel like another financial pressure.

For most of us, the thought behind a gift is more important than the gift itself. Spending lots of money with little consideration is unlikely to beat a present that creates beautiful memories, or hits the recipient in the chest because of the love and effort behind it.

Here are some ideas for frugal Valentine’s gifts and activities to help with the cost of loving.

Frugal Valentine gifts

Create a scrapbook of memories. Print out some photos from your social media accounts or phone.

Write witty captions or memorable moments next to each of them, like how your loved one looked, the food you shared, the friends or family with you, or funny things that happened.

Think about some of the much-loved books or toys your partner talks about from their childhood. Scour some online sites to see if you can find a similar vintage item to surprise them with.

Fill a decorated jar with little slips of paper suggesting fun frugal dates for the year ahead, like a picnic in the park, a trip to a historic building, a camping trip, etc (depending on both of your tastes). Try to do one each week.

Anything you have made yourself, from a crocheted scarf to a painting or a wooden bird feeder, will be appreciated for the love, time and effort that went into its creation.

Make some heart-shaped edible goodies. A silicon mould in the shape of a heart can be used for cakes, jellies and mousses, or invest in a Valentine’s cookie cutter and make some delicious biscuits.

Put together a small box containing your partner’s favourite chocolate, sweets and snacks and decorate it with love hearts.

Buy a bottle of prosecco and replace the label with a personalised Valentine’s message.

If you want to go down a more traditional route, flowers are always a good option. Aldi and Lidl sell bunches very reasonably, but rewrap them in coloured paper and a ribbon to make them look more fancy (or pick up a nice vase in the charity shop).

Have a balloon fest. I read about a man who filled the shower with balloons before he left for work. There was a note taped to the wall telling his partner to pop each one throughout the day to find a love note inside. He had clearly planned and prepared this well in advance and I thought it was so sweet and thoughtful!

More from Shoestring Jane

Frugal Valentine’s activities

Have a movie night at home. Good films to watch on Valentine’s Day include La La Land, Gone With the Wind, Valentine’s Day, Love Story, Pride and Prejudice or Notting Hill. Alternatively, not a movie, but if you missed the truly touching Gavin & Stacey Christmas special watch it on catch-up. Don’t forget drinks and popcorn.

Have a nice, three-course homemade meal by candlelight. If you aren’t into cooking, check out the various supermarket meal deals. You can easily buy a three-course meal with wine for less than £20.

Have a games night with supermarket wine and snacks.

Go for a picnic in the park or, if the weather is inclement, on your sitting room floor. Splash out on a few luxury ingredients like smoked salmon and fizz.

Make a pact to celebrate Valentine’s a day or two after, then see what bargains you can find at a discount!

Treat yourself and your partner to a fancy breakfast in bed. Think warm bagels, smoked salmon and soft cheese with buck’s fizz,  a full English breakfast, or French pastries with good coffee.

Spend the day together perusing some free museums in your town or city, or go for a hike.

Final thoughts

It’s worth a chat in advance to make sure you are on the same page regarding your frugal Valentine plans, particularly if you haven’t been together long. This saves any embarrassment if one of you goes to town on the romantic gestures and the other forgets it’s a thing! 

In the end, your presence is the best present. Giving time and attention to the person you love, and making them feel special and appreciated, is the most valuable gift you can give.

Photo credits: Pexels

The post Love on a Budget: Will you be my (Frugal) Valentine? appeared first on Mouthy Money.

The Day of Love… but not for our bank accounts. 

According to WunderKind, Brits spent approximately £1.37 billion on Valentines Day in 2022.

The pressure to showcase your love for someone by buying them gifts and taking them out for dinner can be overwhelming. 

But whether you are single, or are in a committed relationship (or a situationship… we’ve all been there!) – you can enjoy and celebrate Valentine’s Day without it needing to break the bank.

In this article, I am going to give you five different ways to celebrate V Day without spending your entire life savings. 

1. If you love to cook

Try out a new recipe with your partner. Pick your favourite cuisine and get yourself on Pinterest to find a yummy meal and make it a fun activity to do together. 

HelloFresh and Gusto are amazing food box delivery services that deliver all the ingredients right to your door, so you don’t even need to go out! 

Did you know – A study conducted on romantic relationships found that 87% of those surveyed believe that cooking is one of the top activities couples can do to strengthen their relationship.

2. If you love wine

Why not try out Wine Tasting at home – you can buy DIY Wine Tasting kits costing between £25-35 per person and you get all the joys of the experience, without having to leave your front room!

Or go super DIY and make your own wine tasting kit! Go to your local supermarket, buy a few different bottles of wine, (and some cheese if you feel fancy) and have a go yourself at home. 

3. If you love to be creative

Whether you both love to get crafty or just want to try your hand at something new, why not plan a DIY evening for you and your partner. And remember the fun is in the process, not the end creation!

You could have a painting date, or make scrapbooks with all your favourite memories with each other. Put some music on, pour yourselves a drink and step into a fun but therapeutic activity – a great way to spend quality time together. 

4. If you love to laugh

Take the pressure off of your partner to make you laugh and let someone else do it. Someone whose job it is to make people laugh! A great date idea is going to check out a local comedy gig. Check out The Top Secret Comedy Club in London that have FREE and £5 tickets for comedy nights. 

5. If you love to explore

There are so many fun FREE things to do in all the major cities around the UK, and yet we never seem to get around to actually checking them out.

From museums to galleries to walks around beautiful parks, most of the free activities are great for a daytime date and there is no limit on how many you can squeeze into one day – who doesn’t love a challenge?! 

These ideas are great for you and a partner, but also can totally be done alone or with your girl friends (Yay for Galentine’s day!). No shame in taking yourself on a fun date or having a night in with your besties on the day of love. 

Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

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It’s sometimes a gripe with some single people that married couples get a ‘tax break’ – in fact, this is largely a misguided assumption. The only tax break married couples actually receive is, under some circumstances, a married person might be able to transfer some of their savings to a spouse ‘tax free’. This is something that it would be literally impossible for a single person to have this benefit. So, should married people get real tax breaks?

Here are some advantages married people have over their single counterparts:

Couples are better for the economy

Having two incomes and shared costs means a higher conversion to disposable income, which often translates into more spending than single people. There’s also more opportunity to be a consumer – date nights, anniversary gifts, days out – all this translates into more money being put into the economy.

Couples tend to be healthier than single people

As social animals, long-term companionship is better for our psychological health, according to numerous studies, including this one which can be found in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. However, this, like many things in life (and human behaviour in general), does come with its fair share of nuances. With this in mind, hypothetically, married people should (in general) cost the health service less.

Children

While not every married person or long-term unmarried couple wants children, as biological creatures, most of us are going to want to procreate at some point. Bringing another person into this world is costly, and good for the economy (even if it sucks for the planet). To a certain point, children are something that most governments want to happen in order to balance out an ageing population. It then makes sense to incentivise it by offering tax credits to people with children.

Although having kids is still expensive, and some people might actually be happier not bothering at all.

It seems that, whatever your circumstance, people tend to be prone to see the worst side of their own – “the grass is always greener”, as the adage goes, never ceases to be true. Marry someone for love and not financial benefit, that will all come later.

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I’m getting married. Sound the klaxons! No, seriously, it’s kind of a big deal because when I was 10 I signed a contract to state that I wouldn’t get wed as I didn’t believe in marriage as a constitution. However, I’ve since changed my mind (I’ll be elaborating on this further in another post, betcha can’t wait?), and at the grand old age of 33, I’ll be wed in October this year.

True love isn’t cheap

Never one for letting a romance get in the way of a chat about budgeting, my partner and I turned swiftly from the joy of our partnership to the cost of a wedding. A typical wedding will set you back thousands, and that’s on top of the wads of cash couples will have already spent during their courtship. According to data from Gumtree, Brits will fork out an average of £6,382 from first date to ‘I do.’ So, for most couples, the finances splurged on a potential wedding could arguably be better spent on a deposit for a flat or towards the cost of kids (real or planned). It’s the same for me and my partner – we certainly don’t want to start off married life in debt for the sake of a big old fancy wedding. But equally, we do want the day to be special, have room for our large families, and be an event. It only happens once, right? *Insert cheeky wink.*

Being honest about your budget

With all that in mind, one of the first things my partner and I did after we had come to terms with the momentous decision we’d just made, was talk about our budget. We have always been honest about cashflow. I wrote recently about how my partner helped me get out of debt a couple of years ago. We are lucky in that we already have savings and that both sets of parents have also offered to help. I do not want our wedding to be stressful – we’ve all heard the horror stories, right? Sharing the load emotionally when you go through a big transition with your partner is also something that relationship expert and psychologist, Dr Becky Spelman, advised when she recently worked with Gumtree.

That’s something me and my marginally better half are careful about too and we have now set a budget, done a handy spreadsheet, and divvied up jobs between us. We are also very clear on the aspects of the wedding we don’t want to shell out for, and – lucky for us – we agree on those things. Case in point – decorations. The cost of ready-made decorations and hire of items (such as table cloths) mount up quickly. However, my favourite weddings to attend have been the ones where the couple and their family and friends made decorations or the cake. Not only can you save tonnes, you also give it that all-important personal touch. This is why we plan to make all of our decor – from hand-knitted bunting to lanterns – we’re making or upcycling the lot.

Get creative to get the wedding you want

If you don’t possess natural designer skills (hello, that’s us), it can be overwhelming to think about how you’re going to deck out a large room or a hall for your reception. Luckily for us, we have some members of our respective families who are crafting masters. We’ve been bowled over by the number of people who’ve offered their skills – my advice to all to-be-weds? Accept all offers of help! Also, take ideas from the weddings you’ve been to as well as those pictured on websites such as Pinterest and then purchase those items on sites such as Gumtree, which can be much cheaper than shopping on the high street.

Why I love the internet

My mum’s already been working on wedding lantern prototypes – yes, that is what we’re calling them. They’re made using knitting wool, glue, and balloons. Mum came up with the idea after finding this how-to video online – fascinating, right? Not only is this saving us a tonne of cash, it’s also pretty fun and they’re looking better and better, if I do say so myself. You can buy a load of wool and balloons on Gumtree and other recycle and reuse sites online for not very much at all. Once we’ve made them, we’re going to string them with a long old line of fairy lights. Fairy lights are a wedding staple, obviously, but you can’t be buying them in the shops – buying them online is way cheaper and you’ll have far more access to bundled deals as well as lights used only once from other people’s weddings – look at these beauties! I’ve also got my eye on these lovely lanterns – I’m getting married in a large, rather dark hall and we’ll need some help with lighting!

My friend Suze saved hundreds on her wedding dress last year, too. She told me about a nifty idea she had that really paid off. She’d fallen in love with a particular designer, and tried on her perfect dress in the shop. It looked stunning but there was one rather obvious snag – it cost thousands! Not one to be thwarted, she then found the dress on Gumtree for a fraction of the price by inserting the name of the designer into the search bar. And that, ladies and gents, is why I love the internet.

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For as long as I can remember, we’ve been saving towards some sort of big goal – whether that’s buying a house, getting married etc., which has made it easy to understand our savings. We’d look at the bank and see that we had X amount saved towards our big goal, easy-peasy.

But, since saving for our wedding, budgeting hasn’t seemed so clear. We knew we had money but didn’t know how much we could spend on things and were almost afraid to spend in case something like an unexpected bill reared its ugly head and we got stuck. This is when we started working on a proper budget. One that covered all our goals.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been saving towards some sort of big goal – whether that’s buying a house, getting married etc.

Let’s face it, the word budget is pretty boring. It conjures up thoughts of spreadsheets, formulas, things not adding up, and sitting at the dining table with your better half with a pile of bank statements looking very confused. All those things, I’m sure, you don’t want to be doing. I certainly don’t. So we didn’t do any of that. Instead, we approached it in a pretty simple way. We asked ourselves a few questions. One, how much money do we have? Two, what are all our bills? Three, what do we want to do/buy in the future? That was how we started.

First off, we looked at all of our accounts and added up all the money we had. We didn’t include any money that we knew was coming, like salaries or birthday gifts, we only dealt with real money that we actually had which kept it much simpler – that was our starting point.

Secondly, we wrote down all our outgoings; that’s the monthly bills and the yearly ones that can sometimes come as a bit of a shock, and the other less than exciting things like putting some aside for home and car maintenance. The yearly ones then got divided by 12 (or sometimes less, if the bill was due sooner) and those along with our monthly bills made up our ‘bill pot’. Now, as long as we had enough money in that pot every month we knew our bill would be paid.

By saving this way, we have exactly what we need when the holiday comes round – no struggling to pay for it with only two months to save.

Next, it was time to think about the fun stuff.

Do we want a holiday this year? Yeah! Well, how much do we want to spend on that? £2000. Right, well let’s spread the cost out and save £167 a month. By doing it this way, we have exactly what we need when the holiday comes round – no struggling to pay for it with only two months to save. We continued to do this; writing down everything we wanted to do or buy that isn’t an essential bill. These things don’t even need to be happening this year. Maybe a goal is a house deposit saved for three years time. Whatever it is, write it down and divide the amount up between the months.

By doing this, we now have ‘pots’ for things we need to pay or want to save for. Then, whenever we have any new money (i.e. our salary), we make sure to divide it all between the pots according to how much we need to save for a goal or to pay a bill. This way, all of our money is doing a job and working towards goals, fun things, and the essentials. It’s made our money so much clearer. By just having a quick look at our budget, we can know how much we can spend.

If you want to read some more about this way of budgeting, I believe a lot of people call it the ‘envelope system’.

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Sometime ago, Ed helped me manage my finances to bring me out of a £2,000 overdraft. It worked out well for him too because we’ve been able to save since and I’ve not been shackled by the ridiculously high interest repayments I’d ended up with. We’re still not footloose and fancy-free though. I want to buy stuff all the time; Ed doesn’t want to buy stuff all the time. We compromise somewhere between that but generally I prefer to talk about anything other than the household budget. We are not alone in the struggle. I asked my mates on Facebook how they talk to the people they’ve chosen to spend the rest of their lives with about money – and the results were quite surprising… For the interests of privacy and the future of my friendships, all names have been changed.

Sharing is caring…sometimes

The first question I posed to seven couples was: do you share a bank account?

Most people said yes and that the decision was driven by an event that brought the need to pool resources such as a wedding or moving in together. It normally works that each member of the relationship will deposit a regular amount of cash into their joint account. But not everyone does that. Ladies and gents, may I introduce to you, the Receipt System.

Alice and James, 30, are to be wed later this year. Alice tells me: ‘We keep all receipts from purchases for food, booze, household goods, vet bills etc. They all go in a tin and then at the end of the month or thereabouts, we sit down together and add up how much each has spent and the difference and who owes who and how much. We always have a laugh and some bants doing this. I always make James cross off any cigarette related purchases and he scans, in a lighthearted manner obvs, for things like bikini waxing strips. The bills for the house and mortgage we split half and half.’

Another couple, Rachel and Max, who are both in their 40s, says they’d also started off with the Receipt System but abandoned it after a few years. ‘I did ask for receipts in the early days to record in a manual book,’ Rachel explains. ‘If Max forgot to hand them over I would moan. However one day he did say this was too controlling and restrictive. I had got carried away with my accountant-like monitoring so I agreed and ditched it.’

‘We always have a laugh and some bants doing this. I always make James cross off any cigarette related purchases and he scans, in a lighthearted manner obvs, for things like bikini waxing strips.’

For richer, for poorer

So far, so good. But what about the big stuff? For example, what if one of you loses a job or gets into an enormous amount of debt? We’ve all heard the horror stories. Most of the couples I asked had spoken about it, but a few hadn’t. However, that being said, I was broadly touched by the response. All of my friends said their debt would be shared.

My colleague Martin says: ‘I couldn’t do what I do if my wife didn’t do what she does. It’s a 50/50 partnership.’

It is the same situation for Laura and Tom, who have also talked about what happens if one is not able to contribute as much as the other to household expenses. ‘Recently I went freelance’, Laura says, ‘but up until this point we had been fairly evenly matched on salary. This did mean discussing months where I might not be able to contribute at my usual levels but we’re lucky to have reached a point where we could hopefully sustain ourselves short term on one salary, if needed.’

Equal partners

Laura and Tom’s situation has got to be pretty standard. Most couples will at some stage experience being unevenly matched on salary. Meet newly-ish wed Claire and Matt, 32, who both earn vastly different salaries – something that has posed challenges.

‘I earn just over four times as much as my husband’, Claire says. ‘It wasn’t always this way, so how we have managed it has changed over time. I used to earn roughly the same and we always split things in half. Then, as my wage went up and Matt’s went down as he went into a new profession and was self-employed, what we now do is have a spreadsheet of bills for the month and split it in half.’

‘In reality most of the time Matt’s wages just about or doesn’t cover the half for the essential stuff and I’ll pay the difference. How much this annoys me and the unsteady income has a been a source of many arguments as you can imagine.’

‘We have had some terrible rows after one of us…me… has overspent and built up debt on the credit card.’

Cash seems to be consistently the number one source of arguments for loved up Brits, but what exactly are we splitting hairs over? Spending, it seems. Every single one of my friends said arguments started over disagreements on how much should be spent on particular items.

Alex, 33, says his overspending has caused problems before with his wife. ‘We have had some terrible rows after one of us…me… has overspent and built up debt on the credit card.’ What about a resolution? Alex says a subsequent pay rise (his) has eased conflict over overspending fears, but what do others do to sort things out?

Claire says she and her husband take a walk if they can’t sort things out after a certain amount of time. ‘We talk about it but if it’s heated, we might go for a little walk and put an end point to how long we will talk to it – say 30 mins – if it’s not resolved we will leave it and come back to it another day.’

Legal agreements

By now, dear reader, you’ll have gathered that romance isn’t just about flowers. It’s about hard, cold cash, and sometimes – drawing up legal agreements. Lots of couples co-habit and buy together without getting married. If both couples have different cashflow or have contributed vastly different amounts into investments (such as a deposit), agreeing what’s fair is vital.

Recently, Ed told me that I was welcome to spend as I liked with the joint account we both pay equal amounts into – providing it didn’t exceed £20.

This is something Alice and Tom of the Receipt System were careful to do. ‘I put quite a fair bit more into the deposit for the house than Tom,’ Alice tells me. ‘So there is a legal agreement that if things go tits up then I get a certain chunk back, he gets a certain chunk – basically what we both put in – and then any extra money we would make on the house would get split in two.’

No, no limits

Recently, Ed told me that I was welcome to spend as I liked with the joint account we both pay equal amounts into – providing it didn’t exceed £20. He was joking (I expect) but it got me thinking about what kind of threshold couples set themselves for spending and where the bar sits for when they need to consult each other on purchases.

Back to Rachel and Max, who’ve been together nearly 20 years. ‘We discuss big purchases such as holidays or furniture, TV or phone contracts, something that both of us benefit from. But spending on ‘stuff’ – clothes, gadgets or nights out isn’t specifically discussed. We have been together a long time and we have a good sense of what we can just go ahead with.’

‘Ollie likes to think that he has completely overhauled my financial health and he would swear blind to you that I am in a better place because of his ‘wisdom’.

Often it seems couples don’t tend to talk about a spending threshold until one of them feels it has been breached. Alice says: ‘Tom has brought home things that I think to myself, ‘do I really want to pay half for things like irons and curtains that cost three hundred quid? I would never make these big purchases without checking with him first. I have never contested it though… apart from those *expletive* curtains which I refused to pay for…’

‘You make me a better person’

I admitted earlier that my partner, Ed, had helped me clamber out of an overdraft. I wanted to know whether other couples felt their partners had changed their attitude to money or saving, for better or for worse.

When is it the right time to tell your BAE about your debt or your billions?

Mary, 35, has been with her partner for nearly a decade and says her partner has made a difference but that increased earnings also played a major role. ‘Ollie likes to think that he has completely overhauled my financial health and he would swear blind to you that I am in a better place because of his ‘wisdom’. It is true to an extent, but I have always been fairly sensible and with increased earnings during our relationship I am in a position where I can save more now, but I have to admit that he is a good influence.’

When’s the right time to share?

Now time for the billion dollar question and my new business venture. When is it the right time to tell your BAE about your debt or your billions? Is it time for the world of dating apps to include three months’ worth of a candidate’s salary, just like when you get a mortgage?

Not surprisingly, nobody took me seriously, including my colleague Martin, who went as far to say:

“Other than the obvious security issues, I can’t think of anything more unattractive than checking someone’s bank statements before asking them on a date.”

I still think the idea’s got legs.

What about you? Have any of the couples I’ve talked to got similar experiences to you and your BAE? How do you share cash and how do you settle disputes? Let me know.

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Back when we were shopping around for cakes, I contacted numerous wedding cake suppliers that were in the delivery area for our venue, and pretty much all the quotes we received back were so much higher than we ever could have imagined. All we were looking for was a simple three tier cake that would feed around 100 guests, and we were quoted everything from £450 to £700. Now, I know it’s someone’s profession and a lot of time goes into making that cake, but £7 for a slither of cake, that my guests probably wouldn’t miss if it wasn’t there, just seemed unreasonable!

So, what are your options for a budget cake?

Bake it yourself

Now, this was our first plan. I’m lucky enough to say that my mother-in-law is an incredible baker, and was planning to create a real bespoke cake for us. However, when it came to the logistics of getting the cake to the venue on the day of her first son’s wedding, setting up when she should be getting ready, finding somewhere refrigerated to store the cake overnight before the wedding etc., it became a bit of a nightmare! I’d still recommend this route if you have a friend who can help you out, but it does need to be someone who’s not a main part of your wedding! Alternatively, you could ask all your friends and family to bring something sweet along, and set up your own bake sale type dessert table – this alleviates the stress from you and really gets your guests involved with your big day!

Find a local bakery

Take the word wedding out of your search and it really opens your options up. We found a local bakery and coffee shop only 10 minutes down the road from us who make the most amazing brownies and cakes, and were willing to do bespoke orders. We ended up ordering a two tier strawberry milkshake sponge, decorated with freeze-dried strawberries, buttercream, and peaks, plus 120 brownies in wonderful combinations for under £300 – delivered and set up! That’s half the cost of some of the quotes we were given, and pretty much double the amount of cake, too. Plus, the brownies were an absolute winner with our guests, with some of them pinching them throughout the day before the cake was cut!

Go with the alternative cake

Another option is to go with something that can double up as your evening food. Throughout our many hours trawling through wedding fairs for ideas, we came across a few suppliers of pork pie ‘cakes’ or ‘cakes’ made from stacked wheels of cheese. You can get both of these for under £250 for 100 guests if you shop around, which is a steal if you’re using it to replace your evening food! However, I would recommend speaking to your venue before booking this option, as some do try and charge a corkage fee for these types of cakes to make up for their loss of business. I think our venue quoted us £5.50 per person which significantly upped the price per serve!

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There are so many centrepiece options that can cost a fraction of the price you’d pay at a florist. I’d recommend having a look at all the ideas on Pinterest before tackling this section – that way you know exactly what you need and how much it’s going to cost you. We decided to go with jars of flowers, keeping the wedding relaxed with this handmade touch – plus, we didn’t need as many flowers as we would have to fill a big vase. You can, of course, buy glass milk bottles or mason jars to use, but for the really thrifty ones among you, get washing out any sauce/pickles/jam jars. Depending on how much time you have to do this in, you may need help from friends and family to collect the jars to ensure you have enough. When preparing them, you can keep the jars clear, wrap them with ribbon or string, or spray/paint them to fit in better with your theme.

For us, wedding flowers was one of the smallest pots in our budget, but we made it work by being inventive with the money we had.

When it comes to getting the flowers, either head to your local supermarket a day or two before the wedding or, even better, get up super early and head to your local florists market to grab a bargain. Either pick a flower you like and get different colours for a simple elegant look, or mix up your flower species in a small, controlled colour palette for more of a wildflower boho look. If you don’t fancy turning your hand to floristry, then consider other pre-made options like potted orchids. Or, if you’re following the Pantone Of The Year for your colour scheme, you could pick lots of varying succulents and build them up on wooden blocks for a real modern Instagram-worthy wedding look! Plus, with succulents, you don’t have to worry about them drooping on your big day, you can take them home and keep them after the wedding, and they pretty much work for any season!

If you are still precious about having flowers as a part of your centrepieces but don’t feel super confident about putting them together yourself, you could give dried flowers a go. They can give your day a really romantic whimsical feel and, again, they’re not going to start to droop on your wedding day – that’s one less thing to worry about! Not only do dried flowers cost a fraction of what fresh flowers do, but you can practise arranging them until you’re happy with the finished look. You can even buy them bit by bit so you’re not overspending on flowers that you’re not going to use.

The post Wedding budget wonders: cutting the cost of your centrepieces appeared first on Mouthy Money.

I’m here to share my money saving tips for wedding planning, as I worked hard to almost half that figure without loosing all the frills!

Plan that budget

The first thing you need to think about when wedding planning, is when you want to get married and how much money you can actively save between now and then. As well as that, think about how much money you can justify spending – maybe you’re lucky enough to have £20K sat in the bank, but if that’s earmarked for future plans – like buying a house, a new car, or even planning for a baby – it just doesn’t make sense to spend it all. Once you’ve figured out your budget, you and your partner should both write a list of your top 10 priorities for the wedding, then see if you can whittle these down to three priorities that you can both agree on. For us, that was venue, photographer, and food. These are the three areas that you want to be putting the biggest chunk of your budget on and then, for everything else, you’ll need to find the best ways of cutting prices or cutting back altogether.

The Venue

For most people, the venue is probably going to be hanging round in the top three priorities. It’s the one that decides the amount of people you can invite and also, most importantly, the date you get married.

You need to do your research and shop around. Originally, we were booking a large country manor house with marquees in the garden, praying for summer weather. But, in the end, we booked a small luxury boutique hotel in the city centre which is the complete opposite of what we originally wanted! So, why did we change our minds? Well, there’s a lot of planning and money that goes into hosting a big outdoor wedding in a country manor, more than we could ever imagine. I’m talking about hiring marquees for thousands of pounds, hiring furniture and toilets (unless we wanted 100+ guests using the only three toilets in the house), caterers, crockery, and cutlery. The venue we’d ended up having was way over our budget but, when you add all the extras onto the manor house that was well over budget, as well. We managed to negotiate on the boutique hotel and got a good deal, one that suited our budget. We booked outside of ‘wedding season’ and went for a Sunday wedding in October. And, guess what? It really paid off! We had the best weather that Manchester had seen, probably all year, and our guests loved soaking up the sun on our private rooftop terrace. Therefore, I’d 100% recommend booking a Friday or Sunday wedding, as you can easily save hundreds (if not, thousands) of pounds for the sake of 24 hours. Though a weekday wedding may not be preferable for your guests, at the end of the day if your guests love you then they’ll book the time off work. If they don’t, are they really worth inviting?

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I’ve done speed dating once before and was intrigued by it as there were activities to make things less awkward. We parted with our £17 online, and there was very little to do in the way of admin – they just needed our email addresses, contact numbers, and date of birth. We rocked up at an underground bar and, mocktails in hand, were armed for (quiz) battle…

You’d probably enjoy the event if…

You like a relaxed pub atmosphere.

You take a friend (all the women came with friends, very few of the men did which resulted in some of them looking like rabbits in the headlights).

You’re good at banter (there was time for lots of chatting in between quiz rounds).

You’re on the fun edge of competitive (all kudos to the Swedish women on our team who knew all the answers in one round but not in English – they were very determined and in the end we managed some translation which led to points).

You’re a doctor (there was a labelling body parts round – this could have been raunchy but it was in Latin so it wasn’t, except for the gluteus maximus which are incidentally the only muscles I remember from PE lessons…).

You’re a woman (you get to keep your coat and bag with you and sit at the same table all night, where as the men have to move round a table each time).

You probably wouldn’t enjoy the event if…

You expect there to be even gender numbers (we were four men down and, speaking to the men, it seemed that some had been drafted in on the day and let in for free. They also said they had attended events in the past with 12 ‘spare’ men so it seems it can go both ways).

You are very shy – as you are put into teams of eight you need to be able to hold your own to get a word in (surprisingly myself and my friend (both actresses) had no issue with this).

You are expecting a real general knowledge quiz – it’s more pop songs, anagrams, and flowers. Though we did meet an amazing man who had been on Countdown several times – he was responsible for our team not completely failing the quiz.

You are in your 30s – the general demographic were early 20s.

You wanted a drink included in your £17 fee. The winning team got a shot each, but, alas, that was not our team and, even in Dry January, drinks from the bar were pretty expensive.

All in all, it was better than expecting to meet someone behind your sofa or getting repetitive swipe injury. Although, part of me wonders if we shouldn’t just go to pubs more often and try to win quizzes (that we don’t have to pay £17 to enter) and speak to strangers there. Out of the two of us, one of us met someone and one didn’t, so it’s always worth a try!

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