When you’re starting your wedding planning with a budget below $10k, it might be a real challenge. A lot of couples can’t afford a wedding planner, so they’re stressed because they don’t know what to do, in what order, how to find budget-friendly vendors, and so on. If you’re one of them, we’re here to help you out. In this post, we’ll do our best to find the most useful and convenient free online wedding planning resources for those couples whose wedding budget is less than $30,000 or even less than $5,000. It’s totally possible to have a beautiful and memorable wedding for just a couple thousand dollars.
This website offers wedding stories of real-life couples and gives their budget breakdown. You can find some nice ideas or inspiration for your wedding, look at beautiful wedding photos, and find out about the cost of different wedding services. You’re able to filter stories according to your budget, American state (it’s a US resource), season, and color palette. There are examples of weddings that cost from $1k to $25k. This can be extremely useful for those who are not sure if they can successfully organize a budget wedding in their vicinity.
This website will help you pick a venue and a vendor. It also helps to find out which of them are offering discounts at the moment. You can search for a wedding venue by US state, style, and guest accommodation.
This is a useful online resource for brides and grooms. It has a podcast Itty Bitty Wedding Committee, a list of vendors with their prices, and a lot more useful and interesting info.
Wedding podcasts
It’s a free podcast about wedding planning. If you don’t have time for reading huge articles about wedding planning or searching the internet, you might find time to listen to a podcast on your way to work or while you’re cooking or jogging, etc. Podcasts are cool, especially those useful ones.
Local forums and social media groups
It’s very, very important to find a Facebook group about wedding planning in your area (city, state or region, country). Such groups can give you a lot more useful and relevant info than any Google search. There are local forums, Facebook groups, Instagram pages, Reddit discussions, and other valuable resources for couples who are planning a wedding. And local groups are great because you can exchange contacts, reviews of local vendors, or even meet with people who already have a good or bad experience in wedding planning and can share with you.
On Instagram, you can find, say, a wedding photographer, follow him/her and see the style of photos, look at wedding venues and other vendors tagged by this photographer, etc. You can learn a whole chain of useful contacts from this one person. Or if you follow the venue you like, there is a big possibility that they’ll tag vendors they work with (photographers, videographers, florists, decorators, and so on), so you won’t have to do serious research to find them on your own.
In other words, local online communities are a real find for couples starting to plan their wedding.
This is an online bridal expo. Such expos are not for everyone, they can be a bit exhaustive, but you’re able to find a lot of useful info here. So, if you like researching, listening to speakers, and aren’t afraid of large pieces of info, wedding expos can be useful. You might learn a lot about the latest wedding trends and technologies, find a number of potential vendors, and get some good advice from pros.
Of course, these are not the only useful wedding planning resources. We can’t cover all of them. But hopefully, these websites and podcasts will help you find what you’re looking for. Most importantly, you might feel a bit more confident in your ability to plan a nice budget wedding yourself, without a costly professional wedding planner.
