Your wedding day can be very costly, but there are ways to make your wedding day more affordable by taking a less traditional approach to your reception arrangements.

We often think that a wedding reception must be an elaborate affair in a private room with a sit-down dinner, drinks, dancing, and a photographer booked for most of the reception.

A private room can cost from $500.00 – $2000.00 dependent on the location and some restaurants have a minimum food service charge. You may not be having a large enough group to warrant paying that minimum food charge.

An option to reduce the cost of a reception is to have a dinner reception at a local restaurant that isn’t in a private room and make it a luncheon or dinner meal for your guests where a minimum or room charge may not apply. The Half Moon Bay Chamber of Commerce is a great resource for restaurants in the Half Moon Bay area if you choose that option.Be sure when you call the restaurant you start by explaining that you are calling regarding a reception meal, but it doesn’t have to be in a private room.

If you don’t have a private room then music and dancing would not be an option, so you can further reduce your reception costs.

A photographer for the reception can cost an additional $800.00 – $2000.00 for their time at the reception. Instead of hiring a photographer for the wedding ceremony and reception, just ask a close friend to take pictures at the reception. You can also purchase good quality disposable cameras for the table/s and ask your guests to take random shots throughout your meal.

You might be thinking, “Well, it is important to me to have a professional photographer for the cake cutting “ceremony”.To accomplish this you can hire the photographer for an hour of the reception only and upon your arrival have a “mock” cake cutting to capture the moment and then have your friends take additional shots during the actual cake cutting later.

Everyone is looking for ways to make their wedding day more affordable and special, so I will continue to provide ideas for making your wedding day arrangements with cost saving ideas that you may not have considered.

Best Regards,

Terry

You don’t have to check with a number of web sites to find all the Coastside activities & events, music & entertainment, school, sports, community and government calendars. Just go to www.coastsidelive.com and search either for Events and Activities, Music and Entertainment, or all in one calendar.

If you have regular events you can even post your events by just applying once to be a contributor and then you can post whenever you want. So whether you want to know happening during your planned trip to Half Moon Bay or just wanting to keep up with what’s happening in your community, it’s one of the best ways I know to find out everything that’s happening throughout the Coastside

Coastside Live is helpful in another way, it’s a clean, easy to use site that has a comprehensive listing of resources on the Coastside with phone numbers and addresses:

· Where to eat, sleep, and play.

· Listings of Annual Events and things to do.

· Entertainment venues; all the local services like auto repair; and real estate offices and realtors.

There’s no hype, distracting graphics, difficult navigation, just good ol’ text content where you can find things easily and see exactly what’s there. There’s also a search box for just just Coastside.live.com.

I use it every day to get a phone number for a local business or send my clients and friends when they are looking for anything on the Coastside of San Mateo. I also rely on it for traffic to my business, after the search engines, it’s the 4 highest traffic generator to my site.

Best Regards, Terry

www.coastsidelive.com www.weddingsbythesea.com