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The Perfect Prom Dress For Less
With thousands of prom dresses available in stores, through catalogues, and on online stores, trying to find the right dress can be difficult. Even worse, it might be detrimental to your (parent’s) wallet if you don’t know where to shop for dresses at reasonable prices.

Any family who’s been through prom should know by now, it’s very easy to enter the quadruple digits when you have to factor in the dress, the accessories, limousine rental, dinner, and more just for one night out. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can have a low-cost prom night and still have a blast.

The biggest way to save is finding the right dress at a great price. If you’re anything like me, you don’t want to settle for compromised quality for a dress, so even a party dress less than $50 could be bad news. Yet you also don’t want to spend $700 on a dress that you’ll only wear once.
Find Your Prom Dress in Unusual Places
If you’re like me, you’ll probably read a few articles regarding the purchase of a prom dress for cheap. Most will suggest finding dresses at used dress shops.

Sites like MoneyTalksNews.com, however, suggest buying discounted dresses straight from the dress shops. That’s right, discounted dresses at a dress shop! According to them, you can get dresses with minor flaws or dresses that are on display at dirt-cheap prices, as they point out in their article: “See if the shop has a selection of sale-priced dresses with minor tears or stains. You can sew them up yourself, and if a stain isn’t too noticeable, you’ll have saved a chunk of cash.”

Even if you’re not a seamstress, odds are you know someone’s mom who is. Moreover, seamstresses have all kinds of power, they can make or break your dress, but chances are they’ll make it look great.

Buying your dress from a used clothing store can save you a lot of money but this can also be very time consuming, going from store to store, hoping to find a dress that your feel really excited about and also fits you.
Buy Used Prom Dresses
That’s where buying used dresses comes in. No one’s going to fashion-police you for wearing last year’s dress. It’s true you can go to thrift stores and consignment shops for prom dresses, but chances are they’ll only have 25 dresses and the worst part is there’s no guarantee if any of those dresses will fit you.

This is where great sites like PromAgain.com and the unfortunately soon-to-be-discontinued PreownedPromDresses.com come in. They present you with a decent selection of dresses that were pre-worn. It should definitely be more to offer than your local thrift store, who, for all you know, could just be putting out depressing bridesmaid dresses around prom season trying to pass it off as a prom dress.

As with any site where you go online to find something used, you have to be picky and very attentive to details. However, at these sites, you can easily walk away with a dress still priced in the double-digits.

PromAgain.com advises its sellers (average people like you and me just trying to sell their dress) to sell their dresses at a rate of 25-35% of the original price they bought the dress at. If you do the math here, a dress once valued at $700, only worn once, and is in excellent like-new condition can be yours for $175.
Reformat the Purpose of a Dress
When I went to prom, I happened to buy a new bridesmaid dress from JCPenny online. Unfortunately, I am a “big” girl who needed a 24W dress solely for my cleavage alone. I had limited options when it came to finding a dress, said limitations being I needed a whole lot of dress. So it was highly unlikely for me to find a dress big enough for me at thrift stores or even online at places like eBay, plus places like PromAgain.com didn’t even exist yet.

The dress I bought was actually an impressive design considering the stigma attached to bridesmaid dresses (that they’re supposed to be ugly so the bride can shine in her special day) and for a new dress, it was only $40 (plus shipping, since it was online).

However, it was a bridesmaid dress, so obviously it didn’t come with a whole lot of bells and whistles, so to speak. To fix that problem, my mother had hand-stitched micro-beads that complimented the dress’ color along the edges. It was nothing too laborious. However, you’d be surprised how a little tweak can really transform something.

You already have the tools you need to find a dress without breaking the bank. All you need now is some patience and some dedicated time to find the right dress for you.