Hosted Bar vs. Cash Bar

Believe it or not, drinks can eat up a surprisingly large part of your wedding budget. If you choose to have a hosted bar, meaning you pay for all alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, sometimes guests think that the drinks are "free" and they can end up getting 2 or 3 drinks at a time, bringing up your bar tab to thousands of dollars. Sometimes the bar tab can rival the food tab.

On the other hand, having a cash bar, where you have guests pay for their own drinks can be tacky, in my opinion. Guests may feel less relaxed when they have to keep their wallet closeby in case they want to buy a drink. So what do you do? Here are some suggestions.

Hosted Bar Only during Cocktail Hour - A happy medium can be simply hosting the bar during cocktail hour. If you want to include mixed drinks (which are more expensive) as well as beer, wine, and soda, then this can be a good choice. Limiting the open bar to one hour can help limit drunk guests at your wedding, limit costs, but at the same time guests can feel comfortable getting their drink of choice during this time.

Hosted Beer and Wine Bar - This was what we did at our wedding. Mixed drinks were $8 - $10 per drink so we decided to limit our hosted bar to only beer, wine, soda, and juice. We were able to have a hosted bar all night without worrying about the bar tab.

Supply Your Own Wine - If your venue allows, you can buy your own wine at BevMo and save $$$. Keep in mind that your venue may charge a corkage fee, but this fee may still save you more than if they charged you wine by the glass. We also did this, buying our white and red wines at a very low cost at BevMo. The salesperson was very helpful in helping us choose a brand of white and red wine that our guests really enjoyed. Walnut Crest was the brand we used. Even red wine connoisseurs commented on how good our wine was, and it was only about $4 bottle! The venue helped us estimate how many bottles we needed and they were exactly on target.

Tip: If you are able to pre- order your wine and have it delivered to the venue, that would save you a trip to the venue and some hassle.

Skip the Champagne - Traditionally, there is a champagne toast. Instead, our DJ asked guests to have their drink of choice ready for toasting. I love champagne, but we decided to forgo it for our toasts, since it would only be used for toasting. I don't know how guests felt about this but to us, it wasn't an important part of our wedding. This choice saved us a few hundred dollars.

Feature a Signature Drink - At our wedding, we featured a signature drink that was special to us, cranberry juice with club soda and a spritz of lime juice. The venue also served these drinks on trays during the cocktail hour and displayed a sign at the bar to encourage guests to try our signature drink. This non-alcoholic drink was quite popular at our wedding as it was consumed more than soda or juice, maybe because people like to try new things. Having your own signature drink can help limit costs as this can be the alternative to having mixed drinks but at the same time add something unique and memorable to your wedding.

Cheap Wedding Invitations

Printing your own invitations may or may not be a route you may take to save money on your wedding. If you are computer savvy, this task should be manageable for you. If you are computer challenged, it may be best to go through a printer or company to print your invitations for you. You will save yourself a lot of time and headache. Creating and printing your own invitations can take 3 - 5 hours. If you do decide to print your own invitations and response cards, like I did, here are a few tips.

Paper Selection - It is easiest to go with a one sheet invitation instead of a folded one. One sheet invitations are more common nowadays anyway.

MS Word - MS Word is probably the best program for creating an invitation because of the wide selection of fonts available. Try to stick with an easy to read, block font (I like Century Gothic), not a cursive font. Why? Because you want your guests to easily read the details of where and when your wedding is. Make them work hard at reading your invitation and they may get some of the details confused.

Wording - Select the best wording for your invitation by doing a search online. Here are some wording samples.

Spell Check - Check and double check, then triple check the spelling of all names and wording. Have several people look at it to verify. This is your wedding invitation, after all.

Layout - Keep it simple by justifying to the middle. Make sure everything fits within 1/2 inch of the edge, on all sides, of the invitation for best results, depending on your printer.

Test Print - Use thin printer paper to do a test print. You can then place this sheet over your blank invitation to see if the formatting works on your invitation. When you are ready to print the real thing, do another test print, this time on your invitation paper. This is where extra sheets of invitations come in handy. You can also test out how to best feed the paper into your printer.

Printer Settings - Set your ink settings to best quality and select the right weight of your invitation paper, usually this will be heavyweight.

Printing the Invitations - When you are ready to print all of your invitations, I highly suggest printing 5 sheets at a time. Usually, there will be 2 invitations per sheet so you will be printing 10 invitations at a time. You can check how your printer handles high volume printing. Sometimes the paper will feed wrong when printing multiple copies, especially with heavyweight paper. It's also best to stand by your printer while it prints to correct any feeding errors. You'll see what I mean. This may sound tedious, but what will you do if your printer printed 20 invitations wrong and you weren't able to catch the error? You would have to buy more invitations and this would cost you more time.

Response Cards - Don't forget to print your response cards. Formatting and wording this may be just as challenging as your invitation. Here are some ideas.

Cheap Wedding Cakes

Cake Included? - Depending on your reception venue, your cake may be included with your package. This is common in hotels and can save you time searching for a cake vendor. Sometimes though, they can refund you an amount for cake if you choose an outside vendor. My friend had this option, to get back $2000 to use an outside vendor or go with the preferred cake vendor, who was a well known for elaborate and delicious cakes. He chose to go with the preferred cake vendor and got a beautiful, ornately decorated cake. If that was me I would have taken the $2000 back and gotten a cheaper cake for $300! Yes, my actual wedding cake costed under $300. I would have used the $1700 for something else.

Save on your cake - Wedding cakes can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. If you want to trim your budget on your wedding cake, keep the design as simple as possible. Our wedding cake was simple white with 3 tiers with no gaps in between the tiers. Adding texture designs and colors onto the frosting adds to the cost. I've seen a lot of wedding cakes where the cake was decorated only with flowers like roses or orchids. Fresh flowers look better than piped flowers and look more modern. Our colors were dark pink and brown so we added a ribbon to the base of each tier to add color to our cake. The bakery didn't charge any extra for adding the ribbon which I supplied to them. It's a simple, inexpensive touch that I loved.

Display Cake - Keep in mind that the display cake is just that, for display and cake cutting. It need not be big enough to feed every guest. We got a display cake that fed about 94 people, the photo on the right. Then we had a few sheet cakes which cost only $75 a sheet and fed 50 people. The display cake cost the most, more than a sheet cake, obviously. So if you get a smaller display cake and purchase a few sheet cakes you can save a lot. The bakery will do the sheet cakes for you.

Number of Slices - The bakery will charge you based on the number of slices. The cost per slice on the display cake is a lot more than for a sheet cake. The bakery told us to account for only 80% of our guests eating cake, which is about right, because some guests simply don't eat cake. We felt better going with enough slices of cake for all of our guests. We had about 140 guests so we chose a display cake that had 94 slices, then added 1.5 sheet cakes (75 slices). It was more than enough, but also keep in mind that sometimes your reception venue will save the top portion of your display cake for you to bring home. So that 94 slices for our display cake wasn't really 94 slices for our guests.

Cake Flavors - We really enjoyed taste testing different flavors for our wedding cake and we got to take the samples home. We loved 2 cake flavors but settled on only one flavor for our wedding cake because we heard stories of when multiple cake flavors were available, guests would request more than one slice of cake, to try all of the flavors. So if you choose multiple flavors, then order more cake slices to accommodate this.

Cake Disaster - As someone who has been to countless weddings, I have actually seen a cake collape! This cake had 5 layers , with each tier held up by wine glasses. Thankfully, the cake was made of styrofoam... kinda odd. They used sheet cakes to serve guests. That's why I always told my clients to stick to cakes with layers stacked on top of each other instead of raised tiers.