Surviving wedding season -- as a guest
By Amy Brown-Bowers • Bankrate.com

We're nearing wedding high season, an exciting and expensive time of year for brides and grooms everywhere. But while weddings are major expenses for the starring couples, they can also be financially challenging for people in the weddings parties and for guests.

Laurie Wyngaarden, a research lab technician at a Toronto hospital, has six weddings coming up within a five-month period, starting in May. "This is the biggest year," she says. To help finance all of those festivities, she's taken a radical step: "I decided to keep back some of my tax return to help finance it," she says.

To help you rein in the costs of wedding season, here are some tips on how to be frugal without looking cheap.

Dresses, hair and makeup
For bridesmaids, "the No. 1 cost is the dress," says Cynthia Martyn, of Cynthia Martyn Events, a boutique event planning and design firm in Toronto, adding dresses can vary from $200 to $600 or more.

She recommends shopping for bridesmaid dresses right after the Christmas holiday season, when "there are often great sales."

Wyngaarden is a bridesmaid in one of her six weddings this year. Luckily, the bride allowed her to choose any dress she liked, as long as it was brown. "I was able to get a really good one and only spent $100," she says.

As for the other weddings, Wyngaarden will buy two new dresses. "There's only one wedding that overlaps (in terms of guests)," she says, "so I'll have two dresses for the weddings and I'll alter between them."

Bridesmaids dresses
"Hopefully the (bridesmaid) dresses are budget-friendly," says Denise Dos Ramos, owner of Toronto's Glamourous Planning and a certified wedding planner. "If they're not, nowadays people are selling them on eBay and also consignment stores," she says. "A lot of people are doing that nowadays with their shoes with their gowns with their purses even, just to get some money back." So, don't be afraid to go online if you're looking for deals.

As for hair and makeup, Martyn says it's common to pay $60 to $75 for hair and anywhere from $50 to $75 for makeup when in a wedding party.

Kathleen Thomas, leader of a risk management practice at a Toronto insurance company, was a bridesmaid in four weddings between December 2006 and July 2007, in addition to getting married herself September 2006. To save a little money, for one of the weddings, she had a friend who worked in the beauty department at a Shoppers Drug Mart do the bridal party's makeup. Instead of paying $40 to go to a salon, they each tipped her $10 to $15, and everyone was happy.