I’ve been invited to 2 weddings this year, it was 2 last year and 2 in 2011. Due to logistics I couldn’t go to them all of course, but I thought it would be cool to write about a cheap guide to doing weddings and even organising weddings as some of my mates have been through the process. The backpacker’s guide to weddings! Here are a few steps…

1. Wedding Invitations

Wedding Invitations need to be good. They need to look cool. They need to inspire. Last year…well we got a quirky silver envelope with an invitation written in Hebrew in it which was just amazing. It took Panny and I to Israel to meet Haya and Eliran on their wedding day…we met Haya in Antarctica back in 2010!

How can a backpacker save money on weddings??

A memorable wedding invitation traditionally is themed with some sort of motif. This is something that wedding planners and graphic designers know well. Wedding invitations can also be quite expensive. Before you retain an expensive graphic designer to create your wedding invitations, consider some of the following less expensive alternatives instead:

2. Wedding Planning

Keep in mind that every single person coming to your wedding will need the time off work/their normal routine so advance planning is needed. You often have to dish out the cash up front in these instances. Don’t stress though help is on hand and available online these days with sites like paydayloansonline.com who can give a quick advance.

Planning your wedding as a backpacker.

3. Wedding Venues

This is the most important aspect to it in my opinion. Haya and Eliran chose an amazing setting with a lake and trees in the middle of countryside near Afula. Your wedding venue has to be special. My cousin’s wedding years ago was in Crawfordsburn in Northern Ireland – an amazing day out. Once you decide on the venue, you can also get help on the planning side of things using Bride and Groom Direct – these days you can organise a good chunk of it online.

4. Outsourcing the Finer Details

If you want to relax while your wedding gets planned, you can outsource some stuff using sites such as Pure Invitation or The Wedding Crafter they will then draft up ideas and guide you through the process of creating your own custom wedding invitations, photography options and finer details. You can also get free wedding invitation templates from Wedding Crafts.

If you are especially creative, you can come up with all kinds of ways to make your own wedding invitations. You could buy blank cards and decorate them with pressed flowers, create personally cut tags from elegant paper, and highlight the borders with silver and gold markers.

5. Wedding Kits

Once you’ve the whole thing planned, it comes to the wedding kits for the wedding day. You’ll need Confetti and Wedding Stationary to be there on the big day so do plan in advance.

6. Visa Advice

Also bear in mind that some of the people getting invited may need a visa to visit that country! So do make sure you have the advice at hand for them – you don’t want your best mate stuck at the airport cos the immigration won’t let him in!

Actually that’s quite a lot of work to do, so yeah I’d probably outsource a lot of it for cheap and get married in a country where food and wedding venues aren’t quite so expensive. South East Asia could well be the pick.

Incidentally, people keep asking us when we are getting married – we’re just engaged so no plans just yet…