Neither Seth nor I has ever gotten married before, so we were sort of flying blind when it came to having an idea of how much money we should be spending on various elements of our event. We were fortunate enough -- thanks to our own financial circumstances and the generosity of our parents -- to have a good-sized budget, and using a couple of tools (including TheKnot.com’s wedding budget worksheet and a spreadsheet generated by our wedding coordinators), we were able to figure out roughly how we should be parceling out that money. We overspent in a handful of areas, saved money in a few others, came in right on target for a couple more -- and still managed to come in over budget.

I know not every couple is able to (or has any desire to) spend a lot of money on their wedding. And I know we could have gotten married and spent a lot less money -- but I’m very happy with the party we had, and perfectly pleased that we did it the way we did it. Now that we’ve had some time to reflect on (and recover from) the wedding, though, I thought I’d run down the list of where we saved and where we splurged, and what we might have done differently if we’d had less money to work with.

Venue: Save

We had both our ceremony and our reception at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. I can’t say enough about how great the Center was to work with, but for this column I’ll just stick to the fact that it is almost certainly the best value in downtown Anchorage. It wasn’t dirt cheap, but considering the location, the beautiful space, and the level of service provided by the Center (we had stage managers, house managers, ushers, you name it, all going above and beyond for us), every penny we paid bought us a dime’s worth of venue. We could have saved more money by having our reception and ceremony in the same lobby rather than renting both the Carr-Gottstein and Harrison lobbies. Of course, scheduling would have been trickier in the winter months (there are essentially no events going on at the Center during the arts off-season; consequently, we had the run of the building), so if you want to get married in the lobby like we did, summer is the time to do it.

Flowers: Save

My Aunt Donna ordered our flowers through a florist friend, drove them down from Fairbanks two days before the wedding, and then coordinated a brigade of family volunteers who arranged them in my parents’ garage. I don’t know if this is how Donna would do it again, but we were very happy with both the price (I’d estimate we spent about half of what we would have spent if we’d hired a florist) and the product. If you don’t have a florist connection, there are a few online options to order bulk flowers; other Anchorage brides I know have also used Costco or Cedar’s Wholesale Floral Imports.

Dress: Save(ish)

My dress came from David’s Bridal, on sale, with a $50 discount from a bridal show, and with alterations it still ended up costing over $1,000 -- which is a lot of money, but a bargain compared to what I could have spent on a designer or custom dress. I could have saved more money by waiting for one of David’s $99 sales, or by shopping for a previously worn dress on the Internet.