When I got engaged, I found myself caught in some sort of wedding planning purgatory: I knew I wanted a fairytale ballgown dress and a formal evening ceremony, but I wasn’t concerned with other “proper” things we’ve been told by the billion-dollar wedding industry we’re “supposed” to have—“something borrowed,” elaborate tablescapes, a cocktail hour with better food than dinner, and so on. I was at a crossroads between tradition and my feminism, and the whole industry is built around fairly-young customs amplified by magazines, blogs, and advertisers into things you must do. We first began planning just a few hours after the proposal (we were excited and knew we wanted to be married in the winter), and my mind went to The Dress.

When you get engaged, you quickly learn that everyone has an opinion on what a wedding should be like and how much it should cost: Grandparents think of the cost in 1950s dollars (as if inflation never happened), parents want everything to be just perfect (and draped in flowers, which: expensive), friends want to be there to support but are simultaneously trying to Jedi mind-trick themselves out of the wedding party (all those pre-ceremony festivities add up). And then, there’s this idea of looking so unfathomably perfect on the best day of your life. That’s where The Dress comes in.

All of a sudden, I was filled with regret for not having a secret wedding-planning Pinterest board. I didn’t have a clear vision for The Dress, but I spent hours thinking about it and researching designers… only to find that the ones I liked cost between $10,000 and $25,000.

How much is too much to spend on a pile of tulle and silk you’ll wear for a maximum of ten hours? Some would say you can’t put a price on it—I say $2,500. I don’t recall how I came up with that number, but it felt feasible given our overall budget. Of course, that was before I started looking into wedding dresses and realized that $2,500 doesn’t go very far. (In general, everything wedding-related costs two to four times what I thought it would.)

So, in the span of one week, my mother and I decided to embark on a marathon dress shopping sprint, in both New York (where I live) and Los Angeles (where I grew up, and where I’m getting married in December). This was within the same week I got engaged and left the traditional workforce to start my own financial business, so you could say the stakes were high. I probably tried on 60 dresses—everywhere from Say Yes to the Dress institution Kleinfeld Bridal to budget-friendly David’s Bridal. We laughed, we cried, we got in one (1) explosive argument, we learned to communicate with our minds when a dress wasn’t right and we needed to move on… I probably had enough tulle draped on me to circumvent the earth once or twice. Another lesson learned: It’s not just the dress you’ll have to budget for—it’s the shoes, the veil, the hairpiece, the alterations, the pressing of the dress… I nearly lost it when a saleswoman at a designer boutique told me that the cap sleeves attached to one style (made from what I estimated to be about a dollar’s worth of tulle) would be an additional $250.

Of course, you can find a dress for under $1,000—it just wouldn’t be the one I had conjured up in my head for years when I envisioned my wedding: huge ball-gown skirt, with just enough avant-garde details to make it more Comme des Garçons than Cinderella. Fabric costs money, and I wanted a lot of fabric. At the same time, I’m a financial planner, and I’m constantly thinking about how each dollar I spend could be a dollar saved and invested. Could I justify paying more than I ever had in monthly rent on something I’d wear for only a day? Then again, money is personal, and so is how much you should spend on your dress. And if you’ve been dreaming about it for decades, doesn’t that make it something worth the cost?

By the way, I did find The Dress—and just like all the advertorials said I would, I knew it immediately. (It’s a Carolina Herrera number from the brand’s Fall 2017 bridal collection—stunning, classic, dramatic with just the right amount of modern weirdness—purchased from Glamour Closet, a retailer that deals exclusively in deeply discounted samples.) What I learned during this process is, first and foremost, that you don’t have to know what you want, but it’s worth starting with a number, to at least rein in what can be a very intimidating (and expensive) market. Also: These four non-traditional tips could help you put together your dream bridal look for less than your rent. Read on.

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