I started this article some time ago, before my recent blogging hiatus. Last summer, I became a married man, and in the process learned a lot about how to plan an event and keep costs down. Weddings are generally big, expensive affairs. Weddingbells magazine reports that on average, Canadians expect to spend $19,274 on their big day. In my experience, once you commit to spending such a large amount of money, a few extra dollars here and there to get what you want are easily justified so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most people spend more than they expect to on their wedding. I know I did.

But it doesn't have to be expensive. Though I did spend more than I expected, not only did my wedding cost only a fraction of the typical $20k, but factoring in cash gifts received - which were entirely unsolicited - it actually turned a decent profit. There are two sides of the equation to turning a profit on your wedding, as with any event - revenue and expenses. While I highly recommend inviting any wealthy and generous relatives that you might have to increase your gift count, the reality is that you don't have a lot of control over the income side of the equation. But you can still keep your costs to a minimum without sacrificing the beauty of the day. Such cost savings can take the extreme case, as chronicled in The $2000 Wedding, but in our case we put on a relatively typical wedding while keeping the cost to around $6000. How we did it:

Avoid the wedding industry

Businesses that are dedicated solely to weddings tend to overcharge. Even businesses that only do a few wedding things will often raise prices if they know you're inquiring about a wedding. The biggest offenders are clothing, flowers, cakes and most of all hotels. Before visiting a wedding dress shop, try a few ordinary dress shops. We found an absolutely gorgeous dress for my wife on sale for $270 at the tail end of grad season...the same dress was also available in white for traditionalists, no difference in price. Venues are an even bigger cost issue. The Weddingbells poll claims that most couples expect to spend almost $8000 on their reception venue. Even if this includes food, it's absurd.

Community halls can be excellent venues for a wedding, if you hunt around for one that you like. Ours was just lovely and cost all of $400. The catering was extra, of course, and by hunting around we found a caterer that charged about half what the big local names charge, and would give us the menu we wanted. The key - he's new in the business, having just graduated from the food program at a local college about 3 years ago. In things like catering, increased experience and name recognition does mean higher prices, but not necessarily higher quality.

The cake was, I think, our best accomplishment. A coworker who was planning her wedding at the same time was unable to get her cost below $400. For half that, we got ice cream cake. It was good. The only downside was a limited display time for the cake, but this disadvantage was more than made up for by tasting really, really good.

Do it yourself

With the amount of organising that goes into a wedding it's tempting to hire a professional wedding planner to take the load off. In terms of cost, it's not so much the cost of the planner - they are, after all, a value added service - but the type of wedding that they steer you towards. They do a lot of these, and so the businesses they deal with are in the wedding industry, and charge accordingly. Another reason we opted against the planner was because friends we talked to found that the planner didn't reduce their stress...they just moved the stress to increasingly trivial things. One cousin reported spending days going back and forth about whether to have a matte or satin finish on the napkins. Nobody even asked us that question.

Doing it yourself also applies to invitations, flowers, and decorations. If you're having a summer wedding, consider growing your own flowers. Instead of dropping $800-$1000 on flowers, we spent $90 on bedding plants, seeds, and planters in the spring, and by the time our wedding rolled around these looked at least as good as anything a florist could have provided. $20 worth of decorative paper and some borrowed craft and stamping supplies gave us some beautiful invitations, a far cry from the hundreds that the people ahead of me in line at the paper store were spending to have theirs printed. Additionally, I could have run theirs off my printer, whereas ours were more personal.

Keep it simple, keep it small

There's a law of diminishing returns when it comes to inviting a lot of guests. And I'm not just talking about gifts, though of course more distant relations are unlikely to pull their weight there either. Mostly the problem with inviting a lot of people is that you don't have time to talk to any of them, making the day even more hectic than it already is. More guests increases the cost, and reduces the intimacy of your wedding...do you really want that? My wife and I faced a fair bit of pressure to invite relatives that we don't really know, and sometimes we gave in so as to balance things (I was inviting all my cousins, so Kathy needed to as well), but when my father wanted me to invite some of his cousins that I might exchange pleasantries with once every year or two, that was going too far.

Of the 120 people we invited, about sixty people turned out, pretty much in line with what the wedding planning literature told us to expect. Those 60 people were more than enough, as I'm still not sure I managed to even say hello to everybody, let alone have a real conversation.

As for simplicity - you don't need the fanciest room for your reception - a community hall will do. If you're religious, the ceremony venue is often free or "by donation," if you're not, a wedding in a park can be reasonably cost effective, or the same community hall can be used for the ceremony. The city here charged us $35/hour for a park site reservation. Total venue cost for the whole day: $620.

Reuseability

This doesn't lower the cost of your wedding, but it does increase its long term value. It's simple - buy things that you'll use again. I bought my last suit when I was 18...it didn't fit me anymore. So instead of spending a bunch of money on a rental tux, I bought a suit that will be useful in the future for job interviews and other people's weddings. The same applies to the dress, though I'm not sure what kind of occasion will call for a formal dress, we now own one. Our flower pots will be used again next year. So all these things which we justified buying because they were for the wedding have added value to our lives every other day.

You can also save money by reusing. My suit was bought second hand. Now I have an Armani suit, and it didn't break the bank. For smaller things, the waste management department in our city has a reuse centre, where certain types of "junk" can be brought and then picked up by other people. They supplied the vases for our cut flowers, some of our invitation supplies, and possibly some other things that I've forgotten about. You might think this is cheap, but I don't think any of our guests knew where they came. Except for the friend who volunteers there, and saved us the $2 pickup fee.

Call in Favours

Instead of paying for a DJ, our music was supplied by a friend who could borrow the equipment from his employer at no cost. A friend of my mother's handled the photography in return for $50 and dinner. He's not the most artistic photographer in the world, but he's got all the equipment, and the colour and vibrancy of the pictures came out better than anything an true amateur could have done. We did look at several professional, artistic photographers, and while many could produce stunning results, I do not think they are worth several thousand dollars. The one we liked the best would have charged $7000, more than doubling the cost of the wedding.

Budget, budget, budget

As with anything, decide in advance how much it's worth to you, and then find a way to get what you want for the price you're willing to pay. Be reasonable...if you plan to invite 500 people, you can't reasonably expect to spend $4000. But consider whether there's really 500 people that you like well enough to buy them dinner. Break down your budget into categories, so that you have an idea of your target in each one. That way every step of the way, you'll be able to see whether each item is over or under budget. The largest items are venues, catering and clothing, which together ate up about $4000. We could have reduced catering costs either by going with a more typical roast beef or turkey dinner, or by opting for disposable plates and cups. Neither one reflected how we wanted to remember our wedding, and so we spent the money to arrange a custom menu and rent real plates and glasses.

The rules of wedding planning are no different from the rules you should be applying to any other purchase. Always make sure you get value for your money by refusing to pay more than you feel something is worth. It can be more expensive than you expected, but if it's more expensive than it is worth then it is not worth having at all.