Reminiscing Our Big Day Preparation Journey

I would consider myself young for marrying at the age of 26 for a career woman like me. My friends were asking me if I was pregnant and speculating if that was the reason why I decided to tie a knot with Mon. Of course not! Mon and I were certain we were both destined to be together and there was no point of delaying the date of being an official Mr. and Mrs. Abilar.

When we started planning to get married, we started from scratch. We didn’t have any joint savings bank account nor both of us were born rich. We planned our wedding for at least a year of savings. Yes, we worked hard for our dream wedding and for our out of the country honeymoon. Every pay-day, we budgeted our funds to whom we are going to allocate the payment to, whether it would be paid for the venue and food reservation, for the make up artists, for the flower arrangement supplier, for my  entourage gown, for church reservation and so forth. We even requested our sales representative for our health and life insurance investment, if it would be possible to suspend our monthly payment first, so we could focus on saving for our wedding. Good thing our insurance package allowed flexible payment terms. We were blessed by some generous people who extended their help to us. My sister-in-law Ate Alimyon paid for our wedding cake. It was a great help for our budget. A close friend of mine, Miss Emma, also bought me my wedding footwear. We will forever remember your generosity to us. To save more, we decided to apply our DIY (do it your own ) skills to some of our wedding tokens and for our invitation card. It was cheaper and personalized compared to the ready-made wedding tokens. I asked help from Mr.Google again for the DIY ideas.

These are the photos of our DIY Wedding invitation and our token we gave to the bridal entourage.

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My wedding shoes given by Miss Emma

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My beautiful ladies in red.

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My strength, my Papa, Mama and sister

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For our out of country honeymoon, we booked the ticket a year before the actual date of the flight. I was the one handling our budget for our honeymoon trip while Mon took care of most of our wedding expenses. I was able to take advantage of my credit card reward points. Instead of paying cash to our suppliers, I paid them with my card so I could earn points,  then I deposited my full cash payment to the bank for me not to incur interest. As far as I could remember, for every 12,000 Php usage of the card entitled us for a free Jollibee chicken bucket meal. If you could just imagine how many bucket meals we had back then.

I never had imagined it was going to be that stressful in preparing for the big celebration in our lives. It was draining both emotionally and physically. The two of us independently did all the planning of every bit of the details of the wedding. Mon and I didn’t have any background about organizing any event but we managed to make it possible.

If you want something done perfectly, put your heart into it from the start of the planning stage until the end. Manage your budget resources if you want to come up with a lavish grand party. Remember the entry I posted about setting a goal ( The Power of Positive Thinking )?  We applied the formula for our goal setting in our wedding preparation journey.  It was a tough but worth it JOURNEY shall I say.♥

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12 comments
  1. Beautiful wedding! I was so lucky to have my mom plan most of mine for me since I had just gotten my dream job Jorge same month we got engaged. We were married at 23 and everyone thought we were two young, you know when it’s right!!

    1. Thanks for reading @mommonsterblog. You’re indeed lucky to have your Mom planned it for you. It wasn’t an easy task to plan for such a big event. Anyway, we’re lucky to finally found our “the one”. God bless you♥♥

  2. What an absolutely gorgeous wedding! Have you considered doing a tutorial for your DIY invites? They’re adorable!

    I agree with mommonster, you always know when it’s right, and the two of you seem so happy together! Definitely a cute couple!

    1. Thank you for reading @HappyHippieHomemaker. That’s going to be my next goal to create videos for DIY’s project so I can help future brides who would want to apply their creativity on their BIG day. Thanks for the suggestion =)

  3. You did a great job on your wedding decor and invites. I also had a lot of DIY items at my wedding. I got married when it was trendy to have a theme so I had a very specific idea in mind that came to life. It was so much fun to put everything together. Yes, it was stressful as well but it was so worth the work. Now you can always look back on your photos and feel proud of all the work everyone put into your love day.

    1. I totally agree with you @Ruby. The fruits of our hard work are special memories that we can keep forever.

  4. What a lovely story of DIY and people coming together to help a young couple. You can have a beautiful wedding on a budget! Wish I had some of these tips when I got married.

    1. Thanks Ashley for reading =)

  5. Your photos are beautiful! Love the invitations!

    1. Thank for reading @babiestobookworms

  6. Growing up we think our wedding is going to be all fun and games. They are stressful and time consuming to plan though. It’s all worth it. Your wedding pics are beautiful.

    1. Oh Thank you Devon for reading. The hard work is truly worth it,=)

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