A Vegas Wedding--20 Tips

We survived wedding week in Las Vegas!  Actually everything went very well, no drama at all--except that the bride was a half hour late for the wedding and 45 minutes late for the dinner but according to family, that was an improvement for her (?!).  Now most of the guests have left and we are in clean up/catch up mode.  Here's some things we learned from hosting the wedding:

1. We had the wedding at Chapel of the Flowers and picked a minimal package deal (limo, venue, ceremony, some photos, etc).  For a grand total of $700 it was a really nice and sentimental wedding, not "cheesy" at all as some people think quicky Las Vegas weddings go.  Everyone commented on the great job done by the lady who married the couple and even though it was pretty quick, overall it was very nice.
2. We had the reception dinner at the Green Valley Ranch buffet.  Again, a Vegas buffet may sound "cheesy" too, but everyone enjoyed the dinner and I think more than a hundred crabs were eaten by the group!  The total cost for 25 people for the dinner was $1400.  Also, the staff was AMAZING and wonderful to work with!
3. We turned a lot of our guests on to the benefits of the Goodwill.  From dresses to shoes to belts to ties, whenever someone said they needed to go buy something for their outfit for the wedding we told them to try the Goodwill first, and surprisingly many people who had never even been to a Goodwill are now converts!
4. The bride went to a salon for a mani/pedi but the rest of us did our own mani/pedis at home--we all ended up with nice nails for the (discount) cost of some high-end nail polish at Ross (I love the OPI brand of nail polish but it can get pretty expensive at a regular store, Ross often has it on sale at half price).
5. We had a few house guests and everyone else stayed in hotels/time shares.  With people coming and going, they were able to squeeze quite a few people into each time share room so I think this cost was pretty minimal for everyone.
6. The SIL already had her car here and we loaned our van to the group so only one family needed to rent a car and another family drove here so they had a car.  We were able to shuttle everyone around with ease this way.
7. The cooking and dish washing was never-ending!  We provided meals every day for the group which was a great way to save everyone money.  We pretty much cleared out the pantry and freezer this way but it was good to rotate meat and pantry items that we don't eat much any more.  Several of the guests pitched in to help with cooking and dishwashing so that part was easier than just the hubby and I doing all of the work.
8. We also bought a lot of food items on sale (we went through 20 pounds of rice!) so these frugal food buys really helped us feed a lot of people for cheap.
9. I love to bake anyway so I made lots of desserts everyday which was pretty easy to do--I simply baked packaged cake mixes, made cookies, and baked other desserts to keep everyone happy and fed.
10. Fortunately our local grocery store had bottled was on sale at three cases for $5.  Everyone drinks bottled water here because our tap water is so icky so cheap bottled water was great to have on hand.  If we had a lot of long-term guests I would have looked into getting a five-gallon water dispenser because you can fill up 5 gallon water bottles at the grocery store for much cheaper than the cost of small bottles of water.
11. I'm also glad we stocked up on everything from toilet paper to dish soap to laundry detergent over the past few months as these items came on sale--we upped our usage of these products exponentially when we had lots of people at the house.
12. For entertainment people were pretty much left on their own.  Some wanted to go to bingo, some wanted to hit up the Fremont Experience at night, some wanted to walk the famous Las Vegas Strip.  We provided info on free and cheap things to do and some people did these things, others went to Skyzone with some of the kids and some did the roller coaster at NYNY.
13. Our event was not with minor disasters--one toilet decided to give up the ghost and luckily we had a kit for the "innards" of the toilet that we hadn't got around to installing so we quickly installed it and fixed the problem.  The battery died on the SIL's car but the guys at the shop had it towed in and fixed very quickly.  
14. One daughter arrived with a tiny backpack (thanks to the restrictions of Spirit Air) but she ended up taking lots of extra stuff home so we figured that paying for one suitcase ($42!) and mailing one large flat rate box ($22) was cheaper than her taking two checked bags back with her or paying for an over-weight bag.  And believe me, I checked every conceivable way to get her stuff back home including mailing it via UPS and shipping it via Amtrak and Greyhound, all were more expensive than the solution we came up with.
15. Netflix is awesome.  There was downtime when everyone was hanging out at our house and Netflix was the go-to for movie entertainment.  We also had some board games and card games going for free, fun entertainment!
16. Several people in the group were either active duty or retired military and since the wedding weekend fell on Veteran's Day, the group took advantage of several Veteran's Day specials including free pizzas from Little Caesars, free buffets at South Point, some got coupons from Great Clips for free haircuts, and this evening I think a few headed out to Applebees and other restaurants which were offering free meals for military and vets.  On a side note, I used the $40 veteran's discount for my next year's Amazon Prime membership (the deal expires today FYI).
17. The weather was perfect this week.  It was in the high 70s so it was perfect weather for people to do things outside.  The wedding couple even went outside of some of the fancy hotels and took "wedding" pictures with beautiful backdrops.
18. I created a schedule prior to everyone arriving which showed the must-attend events like the wedding and dinner, as well as the dates and times of everyone arriving and departing Las Vegas.  This way some of the people were able to be picked up or dropped off at the airport in groups instead of being individually picked up or taken to the airport for their flights.
19. Everyone took a lot of photos.  We started out taking photos with each person's phone but taking one photo with six phones was crazy so we decided that people would take a photo then share it with the group.  I've got photos pouring in now which I need to file.
20. Once again I was reminded to roll with the punches.  Hubby's huge family is notorious for making a plan then changing it--several times--within minutes.  As a Type A, highly organized person, this makes me crazy.  But I resolved to chill out and go with the flow so when the bride was late to meet the limo, instead of freaking out, I went over and talked to the limo driver who had some interesting tales to tell (and also some great routes through the city with minimal traffic!).

Overall this was a wonderful event and a great opportunity to catch up with friends and family.  Tomorrow we will work on refilling the freezer and pantry!

Putting Together a Frugal Wedding

Hubby's daughter will soon be getting married here in Las Vegas.  We will be paying for most of the wedding as a gift to her and, since we are basically living on a fixed income, we offered her a nice wedding, within our frugal limits, and she was more than happy to accept (fortunately she is pretty frugal-minded too).  Here's how we have been saving money so far...

• We booked a "nice enough" package at a "nice enough" venue.  Weddings in Vegas can be as elaborate and expensive as you want them to be but since we are #1, all about saving money, and #2, enjoyed a friend's wedding at this same venue a couple years ago, we went with a package deal that will provide the chapel, wedding service, basic photos, limo transport, etc.  Fortunately the SIL is paying for this part of the wedding as the daughter is her favorite niece!
• Next we booked a nice buffet for the wedding dinner ($55 per person but with all you can eat prime rib, crab, shrimp, etc).  Catering a wedding would require that we reserve a venue to host the dinner and catering for the food and a bar, etc. which would be really expensive.  This, we think, is a nice alternative (plus most of the people in the wedding party have been to this buffet before and love it).  The cost should be under $1500 which we think is a great deal (and which part we are paying for).
• I did the invitations.  I basically put together an invite with a photo collage of the couple using Microsoft Publisher, printed them out on my printer, and off they went in the mail (the most expensive cost was stamps).  This saved a lot of money over professionally printed invitations.
• I needed a dress for the wedding.  I will literally be wearing the dress for an hour or so which is why I didn't want to spend much on it but I still wanted it to look nice so off we went to the Goodwill where I found this nice outfit for about $8! 
• Since this is a destination wedding for the bride and most of the attendees (mostly relatives), everyone was in charge of paying for their own airfare and hotel.  We are offering our guest rooms up to another daughter and one of hubby's sisters, but mostly everyone is paying their own way here.  
• We will be providing meals for everyone when they don't feel like eating out.  This will mostly be breakfast, snacks, a brunch the day after the wedding, and random other meals.  To do this we have been shopping loss leaders like crazy (we got 5 dozen eggs for $5...that will be breakfast, cheap sale meat which will become various dishes, and we got a great sale on rice today--40 pounds for $13 which is basically unheard of but we saw the sale today and grabbed 80 pounds of rice!).
• Speaking of food, we tend to send food to everyone's hotel/time share room so they always have food and don't need to run out and buy food when they are hungry.  I got busy yesterday experimenting with recipes and made some pretty good (if I do say so myself) Filipino bread (pan de sal).  Hubby was really impressed and this will save us buying this popular bread for the brunch and the snacks.  I will also make all of the desserts which is pretty easy to do. 
  
• Since this is a quick trip for most people (they will come just prior to the wedding and stay for the holiday weekend) we don't have much planned for entertainment.  I will give everyone a list of free and cheap activities that are happening and let them decide what they want to do (fortunately Las Vegas has lots and lots of free activities that people can choose to do!).

So far, everything is going along great!  I'll write a final report after the wedding.

5 Things You DON'T Need for Your Wedding

About once a week on reddit there will be a thread about wedding horror stories (NSFW if you want to read one here).  I'm always pretty shocked at what people do before and after their wedding--both with their money and their social decisions--when it is all so unnecessary.  Living in Las Vegas, the wedding capital of the world, you see a lot of "what not to do" when it comes to weddings...

1. A blow out bachelor/bachelorette party.  People spend so much money getting drunk and walking down the Strip, hitting up strip clubs, paying ridiculous cover charges to get into night clubs...literally the money they spend here could make a nice down payment on a house in some cases!
2. A big wedding ring that you have to pay on for years.  Judging by the number of rings you see in pawn shops, the money would have been better spent on a smaller ring (and maybe marriage counseling!).
3. Special wedding anything.  As soon as you look for something prefixed by "wedding"--cakes, invitation, dresses, etc--the price automatically shoots up astronomically.  Regular invitations can be done at the fraction of the price and, you know, people will still know they've been invited to a wedding.
4. The big blow out wedding.  Weddings range from the drive-thru sort to the $25 million dollar sort in Las Vegas.  I've never understood the need to spend a fortune on a wedding when more than 50% of weddings end in divorce.  It always seemed like the money would be better spent on a blow out party if you stay married for 25 or 30 or 50 years.  But that's just me I guess...
5. Divorce.  We are also the divorce capital of the world, in part because Nevada was the first state to have very quick no-fault divorces (Britney Spears may have set a record with her marriage of 55 hours before getting divorced).  It's a sad state of affairs when it comes down to a Las Vegas divorce :(

The Frugal Wedding

I came across this article in my feed reader today and it brought back plenty of memories.  I think our wedding years ago cost around $150!  Here's the story of our frugal wedding...

I don't even really remember a proposal (either does hubby) so I guess we just kind of decided to get married one day.  We told our friends at the bowling alley that we were going to Vegas to get married and a couple people said "just have it here" so we did.  The whole thing was planned and organized in a matter of days.  A week earlier a friend's wedding fell through so she donated all of her wedding decorations, I bought a dress for $20 at the mall that, like in the article, was white and looked enough like a wedding dress that it worked fine.  Hubby wore a regular suit that he already had.  We bought cheap, simple gold wedding bands, bought a cake from the local grocery store, friends brought food for a potluck, we found a minister in the newspaper who performed weddings for $50, hubby's sons were in elementary school and were just learning to play instruments in band class so they were the musicians, friends took pictures, and other friends brought some bottles of champagne.  In the middle of hubby's bowling league everyone stopped bowling, we stepped out on the lanes with the minister, got married, then everyone resumed bowling.  Since we were new in town the bowling alley at the military base was about the only place we knew anyone anyway, it was the perfect place to have a frugal and fun wedding!

Whew! We spent Exactly $0 on our Trip!

The hubby and I were kind of stressing out about our recent trip to Tennessee for the SIL's wedding.  Usually any travel results in us spending a goodly amount of money.  Fortunately, after we paid for our tickets to get there (around $550) we ended up not having to spend a penny more on the trip!
We got a ride to the airport from the cousin so that was free.  When we got to Tennessee, we were picked up from the airport by my husband's daughter who had arrived before us so we didn't have to rent a car.  We stayed in a huge, beautiful cabin that the SIL rented to house everyone (there were about 25 people there total and the cabin could sleep 30 people--it was huge and beautiful and perched right on top of a mountain looking out over the Smoky Mountains).  The wedding couple also brought a ton of snacks and beverages and for the evening of everyone's arrival they bought pizza for dinner.  We didn't need to buy special clothes for the wedding because it was casual (it was an outdoor wedding at a mountain top chapel--the view was AMAZING!).  After the wedding, they had a huge barbecue lunch catered and it was brought right up to the cabin.  We ended up eating this huge spread for the rest of the day (BTW the people in Tennessee can REALLY cook!).  The rest of the day everyone hung out at the cabin (the closest town was miles and miles away so there was no temptation to go hang out in town and spend money).  Then the next day we left--again a ride to the airport with the step daughter and we took some of the snacks with us to eat on the plane.  Pick up at the airport was free from the cousin, and we ended up back home having spent exactly 0 for the entire long weekend!  Color me shocked...yet happy.