3 top tips to help you save up for your wedding

So, you’ve set your wedding budget, and now you’re thinking about how to hit that goal.

The good news is that you don’t need to do anything special to save up for a wedding. You can approach it in the same way as you’d tackle saving up for any big expense, whether it be a holiday, a new(er) car, or even a house deposit.

Our three top tips can help you save up for your wedding, even if you don’t think you have much money to spare.

1. Regular savings

One of the first things you should do once you start wedding planning is to sit down with your betrothed and go through your finances with a fine toothcomb.

Look at what savings you may already have – being careful to keep an emergency fund for unexpected, non-wedding-related expenses – and how much you can regularly save from your income. Then, set up a standing order to automatically move the money you want to save into a separate, easy access savings account.

Bear in mind that when you book your wedding suppliers, you’ll usually need to pay a deposit to secure the date, with the rest payable a few weeks before the big day. So, if you’re more or less saving up from scratch, you may want to wait to start booking things until you have enough money saved to cover your deposits.

2. Challenge yourself

When you compare your regular savings rate to your wedding budget, it may looks like it’ll take you longer than you thought to save up for your wedding. In this situation, you have a few options. You could:

• Revisit your wedding budget and trim down some costs.
• Go back to your finances to see if there’s any more money you can squeeze from your everyday spending.
• Try a simple savings challenge to boost the amount you’re squirrelling away.

If you like the look of a savings challenge, here are a few that we love:

The 1p savings challenge – save £667.95 in a year

We love this challenge because it’s proof that even when you start small, it adds up to big things. On the first day of the challenge, you’ll save one penny. On the second, you’ll save 2p, and so on. On the last day, you’ll save £3.65, and your savings pot should be worth £667.95 – a tidy sum to put towards your wedding!

The week at a time challenge – save £1,456 in a year

With this challenge, you take each week at a time. You’ll save £1 on Monday, £2 on Tuesday, and so on until you save £7 on Sunday. The next week, you’ll start over. You’ll save £28 per week, and over the year this adds up to a whopping £1,456!

The 52-week challenge – save £1,378 in a year

This challenge works a bit like the 1p savings challenge, but instead of saving something every day, you save once a week. In the first week, you’ll save £1, and you’ll work up to saving £52 in the last week of the challenge. When you finish, you should have saved up £1,378!

The 52-week challenge gets quite expensive towards the end – you’ll save £202 in the last four weeks alone – so if this is more than you can afford, you can scale back the amounts to suit you. Perhaps you work in 50p, 10p, or even 1p increments. You’ll have a smaller savings pot at the end of the challenge, but it’ll still help towards the cost of your wedding!

The fiver challenge – save £7,000 in a year

This challenge is the most ambitious of our favourites, but it’ll give you an enormous £7,000 to put towards your wedding if you can stick to it. It’s very similar to the 52-week challenge, except instead of saving in £1 increments, you’re saving in multiples of £5. In the first week, you’ll put away £5, in the second, you’ll save £10, and by the last week, you’ll save £260.

This challenge can be tricky to stick to, especially towards the end when you’re saving over £100 a week. But, if you and your partner tackle it together, you can pay half each, or take it in turns to save to make it a bit easier to keep up with.

3. Effortless savings boosts

Even if you think you’re saving every penny you can, you can use technology to see if you can squeeze just a little bit more into your savings. The best bit about these tools is that once they’re set up, you can leave them to it and save without lifting a finger!

Lots of banks nowadays offer “round-ups”, where your debit card payments are automatically rounded up to the nearest pound, and the spare change is sent to your savings. You may only save a few pence at a time, but it all adds up!

Or you could try a savings app like Chip or Plum, which both analyse your spending to see if and what money you can afford to spare. Then, they automatically save it for you in an easy-access account that you can withdraw from, penalty-free, at any time. You probably won’t miss the money, and it can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of pounds over time.