8 Tips for Planning a Meaningful Large Wedding When You Don’t Have an Unlimited Budget

You’ve got to be ruthless in order to splurge on your top priorities.

Photo by Hisu lee on Unsplash

I had a two-year engagement before my wedding day. My now-husband swears I told him I wanted a long engagement so I could have plenty of time to plan our wedding. In retrospect, that wasn’t a good idea. I got overwhelmed by the options early on and spent far too many nights stressed over details, frustrated by family requests, and desperate to just be done with the whole thing. Yet throughout it all, I knew elopement or a destination wedding were never viable options.

We each have large extended families who all live within an hour of us, so we knew it was going to be a big wedding from the beginning. Our parents were very generous in helping fund the wedding, but we definitely had to carefully consider how to allocate limited resources to celebrate with nearly 300 of our family and friends.

1. Identify your top three non-negotiable priorities. Anyone on a budget will tell you you cannot get everything you want. I absolutely adored one amazing wedding photographer couple whose photo journalistic style was so captivating. Yet hiring the couple was nearly 1/4 of my wedding budget. I agonized over being so extravagant about photography and…