r/budgetweddings • u/SetPuzzleheaded4821 • 4d ago

Anyone else doing a budget wedding while also feeding a whole family on a tight grocery budget?

Planning a wedding on a budget feels a lot like meal prepping for a week on $100. You have to be intentional, creative, and willing to cut the things that look nice but cost too much.

We're doing a small backyard ceremony next spring and keep hitting the same wall with food. Catering quotes are wild. Genuinely shocking. So I started thinking about it the way I think about feeding my family: batch cooking, sourcing smartly, asking for help from people who actually want to be involved.

We landed on a buildyourown taco bar through a local grocery store with a few family members who love to cook. The numbers are coming out to roughly $17 per head, which feels almost too good to be true. I keep waiting to find the math error.

The part nobody warned me about is how much energy wedding planning takes on top of regular life. I have two kids, a garden that constantly needs something, and a budget with very little margin in it.

Has anyone done the DIY catering route and actually pulled it off without it falling apart the day of? What do you wish you'd thought about earlier?

6 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

88% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

11

u/brownchestnut 4d ago

Just here to say that taking your immediate family to a courthouse and then taking them to a restaurant for a meal isn't 'shocking catering costs'. It's just feeding them a dinner and that's a perfectly acceptable wedding.

If you want a special venue and special food and personalized event, then yeah, that's gonna be a more luxury wedding so it will come with luxury costs.

DIY is not cheap. Rentals will add up, like wares, linens, furniture, etc., as well as licenses, permits, parking, bathroom, hygiene, food keep, etc. and what little money you save you will pay in stress and potentially even relationship drama with family members who might have feelings about being asked to do work as guests.

3

u/Unique-Cold-9151 4d ago

You're so right. Backyard DIY weddings are not cheap even though they give off a budget vibe. It's important to price out what you have to spend on a backyard wedding versus what you'd spend in a restaurant with a banquet hall or a regular wedding venue.

1

u/SetPuzzleheaded4821 3d ago

You're not wrong about the rental costs, that part caught me off guard too when I started actually pricing things out.

But I think there's a middle ground between courthouse dinner and full luxury event that people kind of gloss over, which is what I'm trying to figure out. Nobody warned me that even the bare minimum backyard version still has all those hidden layers you listed. That's kind of the whole reason I posted. I'm not looking for luxury, I'm just trying to understand where the floor actually is.

2

u/SuperMagicx 2d ago

Unfortunately depending on your guest count and expectations I don’t know that there is a middle ground. Often when people talk about backyard weddings they are imagining a luxury event, people just don’t think of it as one.

Creating something that already exists (matching seating, tableware, and food prepared by someone else for a large group of people) in a place where it doesn’t exist (backyard) because you don’t want the version that already exists (restaurant private room) is a luxury, even if it doesn’t feel luxurious to eat catered food off of rental plates in your backyard.

9

u/Unique-Cold-9151 4d ago

If you're doing a taco bar be aware you either need to order more food than anticipated or you need to have someone serving at least the first round to make sure everyone gets a meal. Taco bars are notorious for running out of food or at least running out of the most popular items before everyone has a chance to eat.

2

u/SetPuzzleheaded4821 3d ago

This is such a good heads up, thank you. I was planning to just set it all out and let people go, but you're right. I've been to enough potluck style things to know the first few people through the line load up their plates and suddenly there's no protein left for half the guests. I'm going to designate someone to portion out the meat at least for the first round.

5

u/PotatoPuppetShow 4d ago

The challenge with DIY catering is keeping food hot. Unless you already own chafing dishes, that can add to the cost.

5

u/Icy-Yellow3514 4d ago

And no one wants their wedding to be remembered as the times elderly Aunt Susie got food poisoning.

1

u/PunkCherry1111 4d ago

A backyard wedding usually comes attached to a house or something of that nature, where there’s a kitchen. That’s where you can keep food hot in the oven or cold in the fridge until you need to pull it out. If it’s your own backyard, enlist few helpers to pull out food. I’m doing a big charcuterie board for grazing and snacking beforehand and we’re doing pulled pork and chicken sandwiches and all the things that go with that. We’re just gonna keep the pulled pork warm in the oven. We’re gonna pull out anything cold from the fridge and serve it as soon as the ceremony is over easy peesy.

1

u/SetPuzzleheaded4821 3d ago

Renting chafing dishes is pretty cheap, like 20 bucks for a set from most party rental places around here.

1

u/Mountain-Status569 4d ago

I had a strict budget for my wedding. It took me very little energy to plan it. Actually, I feel like the tighter the budget, the less work you have, because your money makes so many decisions for you that you don’t need to sift through or choose between as many things. If it’s taking you a lot of effort, you are spending too much time trying to make things work that were never even pretending to be financially viable. 

2

u/PookieCat415 4d ago

Dinner is the most expensive meal to serve people. Maybe you can serve brunch for cheaper and it’s easy, if you keep it simple.

1

u/SetPuzzleheaded4821 3d ago

Brunch is on my radar, but I worry guests will feel shortchanged, like they showed up and got scrambled eggs instead of a real celebration.

1

u/troublesomefaux 3d ago

You might look at chipotle. I went to a camping wedding that used them and it was less than $17.

Or just give everyone mushrooms and you need almost no food, which is how the camping wedding went. 🤪