Bring on the Savings!

Part of planning a wedding is budgeting. Part of planning a cheap wedding is saving. One really great thing to do when you want to save money is by becoming a Rewards Member of the stores you will be utilizing and by using coupons.

I am making all the invitations and other stationary by hand (except the thank you cards, which I will explain later in the post). I am getting them printed at Staples, so I signed up to be a rewards member. Guess what? All printing done by Nov. 14th earns 50% back in rewards. Nice!

The embellishment for each invitation is a small gerbera daisy sticker and a dotted border made from a special border punch (think a hole punch, but larger and with lots of dots). So cute! I signed up to be an A.C.Moore rewards member, so each $1 I spend will get me 1 point, and certain purchases get double points. When you get 200 points, you get a $10 gift card or something. (The only snafu here is that a) the points will start over in January and I won't be at 200 points by then and b) I doubt I will get up to 200 points anyways!) But oh well. The other really cool thing about A.C.Moore (and Michael's, but you have to be special to be their rewards member or something) is that every Sunday there are 40% off coupons in the paper, AND pretty much every time you buy something there, they print you out ANOTHER coupon! I plan on buying 7 sheets of gerbera stickers (each has 12 stickers I can use, and I have roughly 80 invites to make, so it comes rounds up to 7 sheets), and each sheet is $1.99. That gives me $13.93 (no sales tax in my state, woo!). However, I plan on buying the sheets separately, in order to use the coupons to my best advantage (each coupon is 40% off one item, and you can only use one coup at a time). Each sheet will then cost $1.20, making 7 sheets cost $8.36, which means I will save $5.57. That doesn't seem much, but that will then let me buy two bags of those decorative rocks for the bottom of vases. o0o0o0o. I feel so smart :D

Another thing I'm doing is taking surveys. I am a member of MyPoints.com, and they send you surveys. Each survey gives you points, and then you can redeem them for gift cards. I plan on using mine to buy a card for Staples- nothing like printing stuff for free AND getting 50% in rewards!

I am so pleased with myself!

So. Why aren't I making my own thank you cards? Mainly because a while back I found a ton of super cute cards for sale at Michael's with daisies on them. I loved them. I bought them. They were $12. So, there you go!