This is W’s Grandma’s – Where we are having our wedding.
Hey everyone! Happy Friday. I’m out enjoying #FinCon13 and it’s a lot of fun. If you are here and want to meet, just send me a quick tweet 🙂
It has been awhile since my last Friday Question post. The last one was What’s Stopping You From Living Your Dream? Today’s question is wedding related.
This year must be the year of personal finance blog weddings and proposals, because there are so many of us! It’s an exciting time. I love all of the wedding posts that I’ve been seeing, and it’s interesting to see everyone’s different ideas.
Since I am a personal finance blogger, the topic of a wedding budget comes up a lot. At times I think about eloping, but then the next day I think about how much I want a really huge wedding. It probably drives W crazy that I am always changing my mind!
In January of this year, I published our wedding budget. I stated that I didn’t want to spend more than $20,000 and that it was very possible even though we will have over 250 guests.
I have already paid for my wedding dress, which was a little over $1,600. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and it definitely made me excited about the wedding. We also paid for half of our photographer’s fee, which is less than $2,000 (we got her at a STEAL and managed to book her before she became probably the most popular photographer in the STL area).
I think that we will be spending around $10,000 more for our wedding, so I definitely think that we will be able to come in under $20,000. I’m thinking about $3,000 for a tent and other rentals, $4,000 for food and alcohol (luckily we get to choose our own caterers and save money since we have our own venue), and then a bunch of extras that most likely won’t cost more than $3,000.
We plan on doing a lot of things ourselves, and thankfully we have been given some things for free (such as our venue, Save the Dates and invitations).
Related post: Jordann spent $4,500 on her wedding.
How much was your wedding? What do you regret spending money on?
Would you go back and elope? Or if you eloped, would you go back and have a big wedding?
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Andrew@LivingRichCheaply says
I’m in NYC…we spent about $20,000 on a wedding of about 230 people. We had a package deal for photos/videography which included my tux (and my groomsmen) and my wife’s gown. She thought about buying her own, but then opted for the one included in the package (I’m happy about that!). The package was about $4000 or so. The DJ was about $1500. We had some flowers but no centerpiece so that was minimal. The most expensive part was the restaurant. I think we did pretty well on price. When my wife goes to weddings now, she sometimes regrets not have more things (like a photo booth!) I’m glad we’re married already…it was stressful planning it!
Michelle says
Sounds awesome! I think you guys did great.
Tanea says
I’m actually planning my wedding right now. I think we’re going to try to stick to under $2,000, since we plan on having less than 50 people there. There’s a really popular place in Dallas where I’d like to get married, but we’d have to push our date out pretty far to book it. Right now it looks like we will be doing that, which gives us more time to save! If everything goes according to plan, the whole thing should be stress-free.
Jack @ Enwealthen says
I’m not even going to say what we spent on the wedding, as in my book, it’s all too much.
However, I will say that the most important part of it was setting the realistic budget. Once we set it, we were very good at fulfilling our roles – her to drive it higher, and me to rein her in. 🙂
Of course since we already had had the money talk, we knew we were on the same page, so understanding the tradeoffs of thousands of dollars today being hundreds of thousands of dollars come retirement, made the budget wrangling less stressful than you’d think.
Caryl Anne says
Great post! Money well spent isn’t a waste of a money, especially on a moment in your life that will never happen again. Thanks for sharing!
Amanda says
Our wedding was less than $2,000. We had to pay for most of it ourselves, and at the same time, we were planning a big move to a different state.
Breakdown:
– $75 for my dress
– $25 for jewelry
– My shoes ended up getting lost in the mail, so I had to scramble to buy shoes ($10) the night before!
– My husband wore clothing he already had
– My grandma did my hair
– $50 for daises for bouquets
– $10 for flowers for boutineers
– $500 for gifts for wedding party and “reception” (for our reception, we went to a nearby Clippers game and then bar hopping in the arena district of the city we were in)
– Our location was free, as we had a really quick ceremony in our favorite park
– Reception was a breakfast buffet in our favorite little cafe for around $500
– Minister was around $300
– A sister-in-law did the photography as a gift
– A family member videotaped our wedding
– Nature provided us with decorations, and we thought the little cafe was cute as it was
I hate being the center of attention, so having a small, simple wedding was totally my style! 🙂