Money-saving Wedding Ideas

Lynn Truong is writer and co-owner of Killer Aces Media, a company that publishes several popular blog sites. Lynn got married last summer, and published an article on Wisebread.com about some of the ways that she saved money during her nuptial planning.

I was so taken with her smart, frugal ways that I asked Lynn to dish a little more with the readers of NWBride (do give her article a gander first, though, won’t you?).

Lynn and her husband are Asian American, and their wedding reflected their cultural heritage. Rather than viewing these traditions as exclusive to one ethnic group or another, different traditions can be adopted or co-opted by anyone who is looking for a way to host a large celebration on a budget.

Did you plan your entire day yourself, or did you have a coordinator?

I planned it. But really, there wasn’t much to plan. Compared to some weddings I’ve gone to where there was a set itinerary during the ceremony and banquet, with speeches and songs and poem recitals, ours was pretty free flowing with few elements. Tea ceremony — start when everyone was ready. Bride’s family first, groom’s second. Photos at Cal Tech — go after ceremony and take pictures with whoever showed up. Banquet — serve food when everyone was there. Manage the “kissing game” when the guests demanded it. Easy.

The most amount of coordination I had to do was actually before the wedding, when we had about 20 people staying at our place.

You mentioned in your Wisebread article that you didn’t want an engagement ring. What made you decide that? Did you eventually get a wedding band, or did rings pretty much not figure into the equation at all?

The decision not to have an engagement ring was pretty much made years ago when we both talked and agreed about the whole diamond engagement ring scam. If I were more of a jewelry person, perhaps I would have looked into alternatives, but there was never anything appealing to me about an engagement ring, especially when the guy didn’t have to wear one. My husband did ask me at the time we got engaged whether I wanted a ring, which was very sweet of him, but I said no.

We did get wedding bands. I really wanted them because I always found it very endearing and sweet to see men wear their wedding ring. Well unfortunately for me, my husband is very particular about certain things. He did try to wear it for a while (a day or two) before his constant complaining about it (he doesn’t like how it never feels dry after washing his hands) got me to let him off the hook. He wears it around his neck instead, which is something…I guess.

You also avoided the church ceremony and got married at City Hall in San Francisco. Were there any objections to this from people who expected a big wedding ceremony?

No one in our family is really into the big “walk down the aisle” ceremony, since we’re not religious. The important ceremony is the tea ceremony, which we had to have. That’s what the elders really enjoy and appreciate. So it was more a question of whether my husband and/or I wanted a Western-style ceremony, in addition to the tea ceremony. My husband didn’t want it. It wasn’t even that he didn’t care to have it — he strongly preferred not to have it, unless it was extremely important to me. I did grow up with an idea of what a wedding should be, so I was attached to it at the beginning (and I also thought that we had to have it… I didn’t realize that wasn’t necessary to make it legal). Anyway, when that was cleared up, and I saw how much money it would save to not have to book a place for a big ceremony, it was a no brainer to skip it.

Planning the SF City Hall wedding was pretty much on the fly. We were going to visit San Francisco the week before the wedding. His sister and brother were in San Francisco… San Francisco has a nice city hall… “Let’s do it there!”. Otherwise, we would have just gone to our local county clerk’s office. The actual “getting married” procedure wasn’t important to me. But it worked out, so that it was still a really nice ceremony.

You are Chinese-American, but have grown up in the US. Did you feel a certain amount of pressure to have a wedding that was more American-style, Chinese-style, or both? Or neither? I’m wondering about pressure from family and friends, and how you reconciled the two.

Oh, yes: there was pressure. I said at the time that it wasn’t really “our” wedding. A lot of the decisions we made were based on what other people wanted. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time on my wedding. For me, since the wedding was not that important to me, it was OK that we had the wedding for the family, rather than for ourselves. Besides, it was more important to me that the people who attended had fun.

I’m actually not a big fan of weddings, but I am still somewhat traditional. Even though we dated 9 years before getting married, ultimately, I did want to get married, and knew that at the very least, it was important to his family; him being the oldest son of his father, who was the oldest son in his family (my husband’s father died when my husband was 2 years old). But as for the wedding, I would have been happy to skip the whole thing altogether, and do the minimum to make it legal.

Basically, for Chinese weddings, you invite everyone, not just your closest friends and family; your parents get to invite all their friends. I think this is the weirdest thing ever. 

But that’s the custom. And again, we’re not talking about close family friends. They are close to my parents, but not to me. It’s not like these are neighbors who have watched me grow up, and are as much a part of my life as my parents’. There were LOTS of people at the banquet whom neither my husband nor I knew. (This is just for the banquet, not the morning tea ceremony, reserved for close family and the closest friends.)

What I disliked about that the most is the idea that I had to share the night with these strangers, along with my close family and friends. What I see happen most of the time at weddings is that the guests don’t even have a moment with the bride and groom. They arrive, they eat, and basically have a nice dinner with the people at their table.

So there were two groups of people I needed to cater to.

1. Our close family and friends who were there to celebrate with us.
2. The strangers who are there to eat good food and hang out with their friends. It’s important that they have good food because they pay for it — these guests don’t just bring toasters as wedding gifts. The bring cash to cover the cost of their food. That’s etiquette. There was no good reason for us to fight against inviting people we don’t know, since the cost really isn’t an issue. But the food has to be good; it’s a big deal.

Since I didn’t care about spending time with the strangers (and they didn’t care about spending time with us), I made it clear I wanted to skip the part where the bride, groom + parents go around to each table and do a quick toast/cheer where everyone just raises their glass, drinks, and we take a big group photo. With 20 tables (10 people at each table), that takes up quite some time (consider even if it just took 3 minutes per table, that ate up a whole hour). So, I said we weren’t going to do that.

I also decided on the kissing game so that our friends and family could have some fun and be able to participate. And at the 2 tables that consisted of my closest friends, I kept an extra seat at each table so I could sit and chat with them throughout the evening.

I worked around the requirements and expectations that the family had for the wedding, without sacrificing what I thought were most important.

Similarly, was it difficult to make a point about being frugal in your wedding plans? The pressure to spend more must have been immense.

The best thing about being Chinese is that you really don’t have to spend a lot of money. The tea ceremony is cheap — it’s held at our house, and we spent a few hundred dollars on dim sum for people to snack on.

The photos at Cal Tech were a few hundred dollars for the permit to shoot there.

The banquet — like I said, people pay their own way (and for people who don’t pay their way, they’re covered by the extra money that some guests will end up giving). We would have had to spend a lot of money had we opted for a Western style banquet, which requires decorations and all this additional miscellaneous stuff, and where the food costs much more for a lot less food. So it was an easy decision to do a Chinese banquet, where guests get a ten course meal of lobster, fish, duck, scallop, soup, rice, and more, all for about $50 a head. No decorations. No DJ. No fuss.

In your Wisbread article, you talked about your (absolutely gorgeous) white wedding dress, but you didn’t mention the (obviously beautiful) Chinese wedding outfit that we can see in the background of one of the photos. Is that expensive? Is it something you were able to buy in California? Would it be a possible wedding dress option for a bride who doesn’t WANT to do the whole white dress thing?

The Chinese red dress was rented. Since I live in an Asian area of Los Angeles, it was pretty easy to find. There’s actually a street of wedding gown stores run by Chinese people here. They all have the traditional red tea ceremony dress for rent. It was $100 to rent for the day. To buy, I think those run about a $1000. Probably more. It’s actually pretty heavy. You can feel the weight of the silk with the very detailed beaded embroidery. It’s impressive stuff.

As for an alternative to the white dress, I guess any dress could do for a wedding. I wasn’t even planning to get a white wedding dress. I was just going to get a nice pretty dress. But that red dress is the traditional dress for the Chinese ceremony, which is the tea ceremony. But if someone wanted to wear that to a church ceremony, I say why not?

How did you avoid being pressured into buying the first awesome wedding gown that you tried on? Are you really good at avoiding salesperson pressure?

It helped that I wasn’t actually planning on buying a white wedding dress. My husband’s cousin insisted on taking me wedding dress shopping. I had no idea it takes 5-6 months to order a wedding dress. The first gown was over my budget and the lady didn’t offer me a great deal, so I didn’t feel like I was walking away from something I couldn’t come back for later.

Then I walked into the small boutique where I picked out two dresses off the shelf, but the sales girl took a look at me, went in the back, and brought out THE dress. She said I could take the floor sample for 50% off, which was the EXACT price of the dress I walked away from at the previous store.

Is Los Angeles simply brimming with awesome Chinese restaurants that have great banquet rooms?

Yes, we are super lucky to live in a place with really great Chinese restaurants around every block. Competition is fierce (keeping prices low and quality high). We had plenty of options.

You had a great photographer. How did you go about choosing who was going to shoot your wedding day?

My husband didn’t want a photographer. Yeah, he is weird sometimes. He figured that with all the fancy cameras everyone has these days, we can just collect all the pictures from everyone. Ridiculous, right? And he was dead serious. I had a friend who was a budding photographer offer me a rate of $2,000. My husband said he would not pay $2,000 for someone to take pictures at our wedding, even after I explained how cheap $2,000 was. Anyway, before we got into a huge fight over that, his sister offered to give us a photographer for our wedding present. My friend didn’t actually end up being free the day we chose for the wedding, so his sister sent me 3 links to people she got referred to. I sent it to another friend who has a good eye for photography. He picked one; he chose well.

You elected not to go on a honeymoon right after the wedding. Have you taken one yet?

We try to take a trip a year so we didn’t really need to plan one specifically for after the wedding. We had also already been planning on going to Hong Kong next summer. After 9 years of being together (and 6 years of living together), I think the time for a “honeymoon” is pretty much past. It just didn’t seem necessary.

What was your favorite thing about your wedding day, or about the planning process?

I attached the photo of my favorite moment that day. I was exhausted. Getting up early to get hair/makeup done (after having gone to bed late because of all the guests in our house), doing the tea ceremony and then walking around and taking pictures at Cal Tech…I was pooped. I forgot why we had that time to ourselves. It might have been between families. My family got to Cal Tech first to take pictures, and then my husband’s family came next.

So maybe we had a breather to wait for everyone to get there. So we just sat, on a bench, and leaned on each other for a moment.

But really, the whole day was pretty great. The few things that needed to be taken care of, were taken care of by my peeps. I didn’t have to worry about anything. And I felt like a princess in that dress.