I feel like I'm over budget on everything :(

I feel ya! It's certainly true that some suppliers push up their prices when they hear wedding, which is cheeky, and the cost of things makes me cringe! Remember you can sometimes haggle/discuss prices, especially if your wedding isn't on a Saturday as they might be glad of the business. My fiancé is better at this than I am though.

Also, prioritise what's really important to you. We knew we really wanted a certain photographer, and went over budget on that, but our venue doesn't really need a car, and neither of us were fussed out that, but for some transport would be a must!

Were also buying some decor on the cheap second hand from another bride, and hoping to make bits ourselves.

its tough though! Good luck!

I am suffering with this a little myself, I had wanted to keep the wedding under 5k I'm looking at least 8 now...

As said above, you just play the priority game -he wanted an expensive tail coat, i didn't want a wedding car, i wanted certain decorations, so i had less flowers -wrist corsages are much cheaper for bridesmaids than bouquets and less likely to get lost.

You haggle where you can and try to think outside the box -to be perfectly honest, everything except the registrar /officiant is optional. Following on from the flowers, sometimes less is more

Try booking some things without saying the word "wedding" -you'll be surprised at the difference in price, but yes, things almost always cost more than you allow for, we have a bad habit of falling in love and have to pay the price for it. If you want to keep costs down you have to compromise.

At the end of the day it's your wedding, just make sure you're happy with the result

Our original wedding plan had to be scrapped and a number of things have been more than I thought. The only way it seems to keep it under £5000 is to have a registry office and then a function room (I have nothing against this, I only thought about this option last week) or have very few guests in a package deal (OH is very picky about food). It's also very postcode dependant. I'm happy with what we're doing now but our original budget of £5000 is now more like £10000. When we tot everything up it might even be slightly over that.

We'd been hoping to keep ours to about 15k, but ended up closer to 18k (Not including the honeymoon). I'm also not 100% on that figure, as we've bought a bunch of stuff that I've not tracked eg craft suppliers or the food for our rehearsal dinner. We chose to save up, pay off debts and pay for deposits, then took out a loan to cover the rest of the expenses (which we'll be able to pay off early).

While I've regard our wedding as pretty expensive, we have saved where we could. I've done all the paper goods myself, we've not got flowers, I've done all the centerpieces. There were other bits I would have saved on eg not had a posh wedding car, just a DJ, but my OH really wanted the posh car and a band. Where I can I've got stuff I can either resell or reuse eg our card case is going to be part of our lounge decor/storage.

We've splashed out on some bits like an ice cream trike, a photobooth and both photographer and videographer, so there are places we could have cut back to save money.

As metalbride said an awful lot of it is postcode lottery! We had thought about having our wedding up north where I grew up, but it was so much more expensive (as it was close to some very swanky areas). From my research we found that we had significantly cheaper prices in our area of the south west. The drawback though was that some of the suppliers were a little bit 'dated', but by booking early we were able to get first choice for each of our wanted suppliers!

I seem to have a wedding budget and then I find myself buying extras outside of the budget so o don't really have any idea how much I will really have spent. Amazon and eBay are going to cripple me!

Just a little view from the supplier side and the "W" word adding ££££.

I can only speak from a photographer side but the same principle may apply to other suppliers to some extent. And I am going to be slightly flippant by way of explaining.

Yes the W word adds £, if I was to come and take some shots of your cat and my camera broke during or just before, what would happen then - nothing, it would be slightly annoying for you and you would say "no matter Bill come back next week".

I don't think that would work with a wedding so instead of just having one camera used for the cat I have two cameras and really that is not good enough because if one broke then while that is off being repaired that only leaves me with 1 camera, so I have spares of spares and the same go,s for flash and battery and everything else you could think of.

Also on the camera note, I buy at full price from genuine uk suppliers, and I could save money by buying direct from hong kong but then I would be looking at a 6 week turnaround for warranty repairs, but as I pay the extra for genuine uk gear I can get a priority repair from the manufacturer of 3 days.

It gos on - because I have all that expensive gear then I need to insure it, also because I am dealing with the public and not a cat I have public liability insurance.

If I was late for the cat then that too would not matter like it would for a wedding, the cat I aim to be there at the shoot start time, the wedding I want to be there much much earlier to allow for unknown traffic and to guarantee that I will be there on time. And to that end my car is kept newish and I am in the AA.

Then there's the back ups of the images and extra equipment needed for that, high grade monitors for correct colour calibration that wouldn't be needed for a black cat.

If you would sign a disclaimer that you would not pursue a case of failure to supply then I could massively reduce costs to about 1/4 of what they are as I would only need one camera, don't need to be in the AA, wouldn't need to leave extra early to ensure I am on time I could get away with grey imports and all the extra best practice as above belt and braces that are required for a wedding.

Wedding cars are expensive because behind that car is a spare and a replacement driver and someone to polish it for hours and many other things similar to photography, I have turned up to a brides house 2 hours before the ceremony and seen the car around the corner getting ready with ribbon.

You must be honest and say its for a wedding when booking things and yes the "W" word adds ££ - and with some suppliers you absolutely want it to. Anyone shooting weddings for a very low amount must be cutting out some of the extra best practice costs to make it cheeper.

I'm not sure the W word works with photographers, you ask a wedding photographer to shoot a 9 hour party then the photographer is going to charge you the price of what it would cost for a wedding surely but then if you wanted a party photographer you wouldn't go to a wedding photographer would you.

Well yes you would want to pay the extra for a photographer, but small things like (if your venue allows it) buffet food, function rooms and decorations, things you can get for a party that seem to go up in price just because they can when you say "wedding". There are certain "wedding specific" things where you need the genuine article or risk disaster or disappointment, but certain things are unnecessarily overpriced.

What about hair and makeup? This is far more expensive than what I was expecting. Again, I understand that it is important to be right, but it has varied between £60 - £150 just for hair on the day and that is without trials! Sometimes it isn't always you get what you pay for here either, some of the pictures I think they could of used hairspray or a bit of cream or something and they have more flyaways than a ponytail.

I am struggling to keep under 10K to be honest, but I haven't finished yet. It is tricvky to do things for the price we want. I am trying to DIY a lot of things to keep the cost down. For exmaple, we are making bunting which only cost the materials. I think we have got more for the money too.