NYC Wedding at Brooklyn Private Dining Room

With Covid 19 majorly impacting the wedding industry, many couples are now planning for alternative celebrations to keep their wedding date during these trying times. This post is meant to help these covid 19 brides in planning a small, budget but beautiful wedding – while saving a larger celebration for the following year. This article are some of my top Budget tips for an Intimate Wedding in NYC.

A year ago, my husband and I tied the knot in NYC at the Brooklyn PDR.

We knew that we wanted to keep it small and under a certain budget especially since we were going to have our actual wedding in Singapore at the Raffles Hotel.

We started the day at the Marriage Bureau at the City Clerk. The NYC Marriage License costs $25 and the NYC Marriage Certificate was $35. We invited our closest friends to line up with us and my brother flew in from Seattle and my sister in law flew in from Vancouver. My mother was visiting NYC at that time so it was the perfect timing to have a City Hall Wedding Ceremony.

We then took some photos at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and headed to Brooklyn Private Dining Room by Naturally Delicious for a sit down meal for five. By the first course, I was already so stuffed! We enjoyed our early dinner with wine and too many courses. By 7 PM, we had a room flip for a cocktail party. For each guest, a full sit down meal was $150 per person.

This was where we invited around 35-40 guests, which was $75 per person. We had many group of friends and we didn’t want to force anyone to do a long sit down dinner. A cocktail party with a bar and finger foods was perfect for us.

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How to plan a NYC Wedding under 5k in 2 weeks

Cost Breakdown for a NYC Covid 19 Elopement

City Hall Ceremony: $55

Sit down Dinner for 5: $750

Cocktail Party for 40 guests: $3200

Red Velvet Cake from Billy’s: $65

White Dress from BHLDN: $250

Suit: Rent a Suit from The Black Tux

Favors, Decorations and Florals: $500

Hair: $55 (I did my own makeup)

Photography: My sister in law is a photographer and she kindly gifted us her service!

Related: Guide to Planning Your NYC City Hall Wedding

How to Find the Best Wedding Photographer in New York City

Inquire now if you’re looking for any special pricing for elopement packages.

Total Cost: $4872

Here are some of my top Budget tips for an Intimate Wedding

Keep the guest count small:

The smaller the guest count, the less you will spend on meals for your guest!

Go the non traditional route:

Have a cocktail party instead of a sit down dinner

Have a weekday celebration:

Most Venues have different pricings for a weekday celebration. If you are trying to save on cost, consider celebrating on a weekday over a Saturday.

Go Paperless:

Invite your guests over text or when you physically meet them – We skipped doing physical invites or a full on wedding website. We invited our guests when we hanged out with them, went to work, through text and phone calls.

Don’t overthink!

Give yourself a timeline – I had 2 weeks to plan for our city hall wedding and this really helped with budgeting. This really helps to not overthink decisions. We went for the bare essentials, no frills and extras!

DIY it!

My mom and I had so much fun shopping at the flower district and designing the floralscapes and my bouquet. I loved having a personal touch to the day. I even brought my own plates from home to the venue so that I could have full control of how the tablescape would look like!

You can also DIY your wedding favors! I went to TJ max, bought a set of Jam and used ribbons that I had at home to jazz them up!