While surfing the blogosphere, Kristen Seymour over at AisleDash.com wrote about her experience with finding cakes and I must say she’s right on.  Rather than spending $4 or more per slice on wedding cake, she went to her local grocery store and had a 3 tier cake made for cheap.  This is a great, creative idea to saving money that almost anyone can use. 

Read the full article here.

If you’re having a wedding in the fall months, you might want to spice up the event with some items that coinside with the fall season. You can make centerpieces that are cornucopias made of gourds, squashes, cranberries, dried flowers or leaves. You could even fill a hurricane lamp with cranberries and place a candle on top.

Food can include fall ideas as well by including items like squash and potatoes along with salads for the greens.  Pumpkin pie is a great dessert choice…yum. Consider using pumpkin in your wedding cake as well.

Be sure to include fall wedding favors as well. You could include use place card holders in the shape of leaves or send guests home with a wreath or christmas tree ornament as the christmas will be just around the corner (Christmas Tree Shop anyone?)

There’s lots of ways to have a fall wedding that doesn’t break the bank. So have fun with it.

So if you’re looking for another way to save money, consider making your own wedding cake.  CakeChannel.com has an e-book on how to make your own wedding cake. This book includes more than 100 cake recipes from all over the world, 1500+ photos of celebration cakes with information about the artist.

They charge $40 for the book, but it’s yours to keep so even if you just need a creative or different idea to out do your friend that just got married, it might worth it.  Take a look at the “Dream Cakes Made Easy” web page and see what you think. 

Not convinced that it’s worth it to try to cut costs for the most important day of your life? Consider this: what if you had a small private affair for your closest friends and relatives and didn’t buy an expensive engagement ring, spending around $13,000 for your wedding instead of the average price tag of $27,000?

What if you invested the $14,000 you saved in the stock market and left it there until you retired (assuming 40 years later), earning an average of 10% a year? What would you end up with? A whopping $634,000!

It’s hard to look so far ahead when you’re just starting out in your life together, but the world is full of people who find themselves quickly approaching retirement age without the financial means to retire. When all is said and done, I’ll bet many of them would have traded a bigger, fancier wedding for the $634,000 nest egg.

For more tips on saving costs, see the full article on About.com

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Get the cake you have always wanted…just don’t pay for it! Here are great tips to treat your guests to a tasty cake at a tasty price:

1. Make sure that the decoration and design is the right kind to suit your taste, before you agree to give an order to the baker. Go through referrals and see what prices are being quoted. Look through the samples first before deciding on your cake. A supermarket could offer a wide range of cakes at a lesser cost than your bakery.
2. Decide on how you want to decorate your wedding cake, whether you want to keep it simple and cute or splendid and rich. Avoid over-decorating the cake. It is not necessary to have a five-tiered cake. You can have your cake stacked if you want.
3. Remember that bakers who do not specialize in wedding cakes could still bake the best cakes and cost less. Home bakers do not charge much and could make lovely cakes.
4. Consider borrowing the pillars. There are disposable pillars available with your local baker or rental companies which are a better alternative than those crystal pillars if you want to cut down on the cost of the pillars. Let the baker or your local rental company help you with the disposable pillars instead of the crystal ones.
5. Find prices at a cake making or culinary school near your place. Students have baking and decorating cakes as part of their curriculum. You can be assured that you will get a gorgeous cake and have it made at a very low price.
6. Save on your wedding cake topper prices. Often relatives and well-wishers ask what you need as a gift. Ask them for a wedding cake topper.
7. If you buy a multi-tiered cake, see that you decorate it yourself or have the florist do it for you. If you want flowers on your cake but the cost of the artificial flowers isn’t fitting in your budget, let your florist put real flowers on the cake. Just make sure that they are non-toxic. Check the price of the organic edible flowers.
8. Consider a smaller tiered cake for effect, and get a sheet cake to feed the guests, once the cake is cut, no one can tell what shape it was in originally!

BWG Two Cents: Ask the baker to use cardboard for the bottom tiers and real cake only on the top tier; this is the one you’ll be cutting into. Then the cake is taken in the back to be sliced. Sheet cakes decorated the same as your wedding cake are then sliced and served to the guests. No one will ever know!