9 Budget Saving Tips For Backyard Weddings

01

Location, location, location

Scouting for locations is the most vital part of planning and can be the most expensive part of a traditional wedding. If you don’t have a backyard of your own, rather than looking for airbnb homes that may charge you extra for a wedding event, try reaching out to family members or close friends who would be willing to let you use their yard for your big day. This would bring your venue cost to as low as $0 and save you thousands on your wedding budget. 

02

When the weather takes a turn for the worse…

Mother Nature is unpredictable, and something that you should always be prepared for. Rather than renting a tent that may or may not be used, you can try to find a place that already has a covered porch or plenty of inside room to move the event in a worst case scenario. If you must use a tent, make sure to consider how much the cost of renting a tent might be, and work it into your overall budget. 

03

Trees, flower beds, and pots-OH MY!

Keep in mind how the landscaping in the backyard looks and see if you can use it to your advantage. Look for collections of trees that can be decorated or flower beds that will make for the perfect backdrops for a ceremony; enhancing these or moving things around can help you save on spending on an arch or backdrop. Look for areas of the yard that can be perfect for photo ops and make use of beautifully displayed potted plants that can be used as centerpieces for your tables. Kaitlin doesn’t recommend attempting to create elaborate floral arrangements without a professional because it usually ends up being more stressful for you and your family members. However, it is usually safe to make arrangements in advance out of dried or faux flowers so that you’re not worrying about wilted flowers on your wedding day. 

04

Don’t keep guests in the dark

Make sure that there is appropriate lighting for the yard as well. If you know that your wedding will be going into the night, you don’t want to rely on one porch light to keep your guest from sitting in the dark.  Consider whether your backyard of choice already has good lighting, or look into some affordable backyard Edison bulb backyard string lights to create a nice ambient mood for dinner and dancing. 

05

Should you hire a wedding coordinator? Yes! And here’s why

No matter the size of your wedding, it is advisable to hire a day-of wedding coordinator to help keep the stress off of you and your guests on the day of your wedding. You don’t need to hire one to help you with the entire planning process, but Kaitlin Shea Weddings highly recommends consulting with a coordinator at least the month before your wedding. This would require you to reach out and schedule dates and times with vendors, as well as doing the majority of the work in the months leading up to the wedding, but allow you to consult with a professional who can help you wrap up all of the last minute planning. You can hire a wedding coordinator whenever you feel will be beneficial to you and your budget, but give your coordinator at least a month to allow them to feel fully prepared to help you on the wedding day. 

06

Skimping on catering can ruin an event

You want to make sure that your wedding guests are well fed, and for those who are planning on only having 5-10 people, it can be totally doable to gather some family members and prepare the meal yourselves. Wedding coordinator Kaitlin recommends more food choices for larger guest counts, and to properly plan and budget for there to be enough food to feed all of your guests. 

07

Repurpose to save on seating and decor

These two categories can easily use up a majority of your budget. Definitely consider how many people you are going to have to seat, for both the ceremony and the reception. You can reuse chairs from the ceremony by moving them to the tables for dinner. Or, if you plan to have long banquet tables, opt for using benches for both ceremony and reception in order to make the swap faster. This will save you money on buying a chair for every single guest. Definitely reuse and repurpose any decoration that is going to be used for the ceremony into the reception by turning aisle decor into table centerpieces, or move the archway to behind the sweetheart table. 

08

Ask for an hourly photography rate

Something that will be difficult to budget on is a photographer (check out our article Why Do Wedding Photographers Cost So Much? to find out why). You don’t want to risk bad quality photos of your big day for the sake of saving money, so rather than booking a photographer for the whole day, you can ask them if they would offer an hourly rate to just photograph your ceremony, an individual couples shoot, and parts of the reception. This will also lower the amount of photos that your photographer will have to go through and edit later on, overall lowering your costs, and you’ll get the photos of your big day even sooner! And please, don’t ask Uncle Steve to be your photographer just because he owns a Nikon. 

09

Get creative with music

Renting out a DJ can get expensive, but can also take the pressure off of you and your guests to worry about music and timing. Ask around and see if anyone you know is getting into mixing music, and see if they would be interested in being a DJ for your event. An alternative to a DJ is to make a curated playlist for your event and put one person in charge of pressing play. This can be either a family member or your event coordinator who knows when to play your specific songs during both the ceremony and reception. Make sure to have a good quality speaker or sound system that will keep the party alive, but won’t get you in trouble with your neighbors.