Congrats on choosing a date! how exciting.

The first thing we did was to choose a date and then book a venue. We ended up just hiring a hall for the day and getting a caterer to do the food. Worked out to be about $35 per head for a buffet style meal, a full dinner with 3 courses. It was more expensive (about $4 per head) if we wanted to have table service as they'd have needed more staff for us, so we chose buffet instead. We looked into function centres in the area and they all wanted about $70 per head.

For our flowers, we just went to a wholesale florist and got them pretty cheaply and made up our own bouquets. Its was heaps cheaper than getting the florist to make the bouquets up for us. I think we saved about $50 per bouquet. We got the flowers the day before and made up the bouquets the morning of the wedding. We used pretty ribbons bought from a $2 shop to tie the ribbons up. We got married at 3:30pm so plenty of time to do stuff in the morning.

We made our own invitations. We went to a stationary shop and bought some pretty papers and then made up some invitations in Word and printed them at work (naughty, but I dont think anyone noticed). I think they ended up being about $2.50 each aand we only invited about 70 people most of whom were couples, so it ended up being about 40 invitations in total.

We found a great celebrant and he charged us $320 for the day.

I saw some nice dresses in a formal dress shop. They werent actual wedding dresses, but were still very pretty and much less expensive than a full wedding gown. I ended up getting an actul wedding dress though as I was very picky. I've also seen some lovely dresses that would be suitable for a bride, in dress shops, for as little as $60.

We got a simple cake made for us. I cant remeber how much it cost - maybe $100?

For our car, we hired a convertible from one of those car hire places (europcar, i think). We ended up getting a discount as they stuffed up and sent the car to the wrong depot and we had to wait an extra 2 hours for it. Anyway, my step-dad drove the car for us. It was cheaper than hiring a car + driver.