Wedding Strut
analog_tape
604 Posts
My girl and I are getting married next year and i'm trying to get an idea of how much it will cost, i there are tons of factors but i'm trying to stay within a certain budget.How much did your wedding cost?
Comments
This is a really hard question to answer in any general way.
My wedding, for example, cost maybe...$300-400, tops? But I had it in the backyard of a friend's place, did it as a potluck so the food costs were low, and I think we had, at most, 50-60 people. And we loved it and people had a great time...partially, I think, because it wasn't like a conventional wedding but more like an afternoon, backyard party with a short wedding ceremony thrown in the midst.
In contrast, when my high school friend got married, the guest list was 900 and they had to rent out the ballroom at the Universal City Hilton (or Sheraton or whatever) and the whole thing was catered by the hotel, plus a DJ, etc. etc. If that thing didn't cost at least $30,000, I'd be amazed.
So...somewhere between $300 and $30,000? I doubt that's a useful set of numbers for you.
Start with the basics: how many people do you plan on inviting? Will you have food? If so, who will cater? What kind of location do you want (i.e. will it require that you rent space)? Are you going to hire a DJ? Or a wedding planner for that matter?
My wife and I spent over 20k and it was an unconventional wedding with major hook-ups on stuff like flower arrangements and invitations and our own PeacefulRotations DJing the event. The space rental alone was over 10k with food included and open bar all night.
Conversely, a cousin of mine married into a rich family and the cocktail hour alone probably topped 20k. There was a jazz band, two open bars, three food stations with shit like frenched racks of lamb, lobster, and so on. The reception featured a 10-piece band, another open bar, filet mignon, the guest list was 300+... all held at a country club in south Jersey. I guarantee you they dropped close to 100k.
Ha, for some reason, I figured dinner started at $30/head vs. $100! Clearly, I'm disconnected from both the streets AND wedding planning.
ZING!
This is a great idea!!! My wife & I are getting remarried next yr on our 10th anniversary and I am totally gonna ask for permission
I tried this one out a few years ago:
http://usnaps.com/
It takes fairly impressive pictures for a booth.
150 list
it'll come up to 3000$
my parents pay the food, the bride the booze
photographer friend
with people's $$$ gifts we can repay the costs and get a trip to senegal out of it
honewmoon!
do what you need to do don'T keep up with the joneses
of course i am 24 year old grad student
we put a couple of disposable cameras on each table at our wedding for a similar result, was great to see some of the stuff we missed out on.
It was a fucking beautiful wedding. Wouldn't have changed a thing. Fact is you're going to be in the 20-30k range for a half decent wedding. I really think it's impossible to get under 20k unless you do some things straight budget style or you have some major luck. Expect things to add up fast and just learn to deal with it. It took us a long time to get over how expensive everything was, but it's your day and all you can do is enjoy it.
The photobooth was $1000 for the night and all the prints (unlimited). It was the best purchase. Everyone loved it and, as Jonny mentioned, you get pictures of smiling people that are casual and better than a photographer would get. You get something totally different than regular pictures. We even had older relatives popping in there not knowing where to look and all 4 of them staring at the wrong spot, not changing up their poses for four shots straight. Four shots, looking in the wrong spot, no motion. So funny.
Our friends recently did a backyard style wedding that was awesome. Very simple yet really comfortable and enjoyable and still kind of classy in a way. They had pies instead of a wedding cake.
Wedding cakes are a huge rip off. Quadruple the price for something that only gets looked at and then is taken away and hacked to pieces. 50% of the people wont even eat it or stay long enough to get it. If you ask the cake place for a sheet cake of the same exact cake it will be like $150 and then you make it round and call it a wedding cake and it's $800. We actually bought a cheap stand-in cake as a display and the got sheet cakes of the one we liked the taste of. Saved a lot of money.
All respect due but it all depends on what you mean by "half decent."
If you're going to go the route of having a conventional wedding, by which I mean, "shit you see in popular culture," then yeah, it's going to be expensive. I mean, there's a reason why the wedding industry is a multi-billion dollar one; people expect to pay a heavy chunk of change and there's a gazillion different vendors out there clamoring to get a piece of it.
But when you get away from the boilerplate "fairytale" wedding, there's just a lot of different ways to do it. Some are expensive, many are not, at all. It all depends on what you want your wedding to be like.
Real talk: I've been to a lot of those weddings - more than I care to remember. The vast majority of them were - from an attendee's point of view - dull, even tedious. The amount spent on the wedding didn't make a difference at all.
I do think the size of the wedding is more determinant than price; the bigger you get, the more likely you have to concede to certain conventions. A good wedding - from an attendees point of view - is based largely on the chemistry of the collected guests and for real: that's pretty fucking hard to achieve in many cases when you're mixing people you *need* to invite vs. people you *want* to invite. With my wedding, we happily agreed: no extended family. We had a separate banquet for that which made them happy. And we got to have a small wedding of all friends plus our immediate family and that made us happy. Win-win.
This reminds me: one of the best "bigger" weddings I've been to was Justin's. It was a big mix of friends and family, but the energy was just <i>good</i>. My only regret is that I had to leave early to get my then-infant daughter home for bed. I'm assuming their wedding wasn't cheap but it wasn't the money that made it good.
Saying mang, in about 10-15 years, you might have to sell off your *cough cough* collection to pay for your wedding.
Real talk, especially as attendees go.
If you're gonna drop $$$$$, I'd go the Bizzo Kauai route. That looked like a LOT of fun from the photos.
But my parents wedding cost the price of their rings and I don't own a suit so what do I know.
I will say two things:
1) Do not doubt how incredible wedding potluck food can be. I mean if you're inviting people who you're really close to they will step their game up HARD. Hands down the best wedding food I've had has been potluck-style. In contrast I don't think I have ever had a catered meal that actually impressed me, even thinking back to the most balleur of weddings I've been to.
2) There is a HUGE difference between paying some company/caterer/whatever a lot of money for your event and paying a friend whose a bartender/photographer/caterer/DJ, whatever. I would be very hesitant to do the former, but would gladly pay and tip generously the latter. It drives me crazy when people are planning large events and spend all this money on some company they picked off the internet and then ask the homie to do a favor for free/a discount because they're trying to cut costs. Pay the homie, bargain hard with the others.
This is my buddy Jimmy's company, dude is solid as solid gets.
He's based out of Seattle give him a shout!
There are a lot of ingredients to a wedding and it's seldom just the stereotypical bridezilla that forces certain issues. That is some borderline sexist shit right there that any girl who wants something more than a courthouse or a backyard BBQ has been brainwashed by pop culture, advertising, and fairytales. At the end of the day the best thing you can do is stay true to yourselves and throw the best party you know how to. But it's seldom as simple as all that. For us:
- we rented a huge, beautiful old brownstone off prospect park that has functioned as a social club in various forms since the 19th century. They did all of the food in house and provided unlimited liquor all night. This was a key savings as we like to drink - a lot - and liquor buys can get very pricy. We held the ceremony upstairs and the reception downstairs (another savings) and the feeling was very much one of being in this big old house. Not a hall or club.
- we got generous help from the families. That said, of course we had to invite some folks we might not have otherwise. But in the end, that was beautiful... So many different people from all over, getting down and celebrating together. I don't regret it.
- we did contract a day-of planner. In-fucking-valuable, if you are corralling 100 or so folks and trying to have it all go off without a hitch.
- Every aspect of the event had the personal stamp of working with friends. I totally encourage it. Everyone got paid and we didn't get extorted. Be creative - we had a graphic designer friend do the invitations, despite that he doesn't ever do shit like wedding invitations because he doesn't have to.
- Most important to me was not just that my wife was happy, but that our folks - who had never met before that week - were. I don't regret a cent of the money when I look back on it. And we keeep getting told, "that was the best wedding I've ever been to" by friends, thanks no doubt in part to Mr BCause killing it on the music, but also to the personal touches and the love in that place. That's what it's all about IMO.
and only the people we really want to be there
i got a ridiculous deal on the room but 30k for a half decent wedding is my budget tenfold
as far as food my dad is one of the greatest cooks (french/senegal) i have ever tasted and he will go all out for his son...a matter of principle.
the thing about pop culture is mostly the expectations...
my sisters are hatting and speaking on how their wedding won't be like ours...great...we will just spend our money on travelling and helping out NGO's
but no knock on the costs because like johnny said shit adds up
we got very lucky
Everybody's experience, expectations, needs and wants are different...I would never say in a situation like marriage that there is a "right" way and a "wrong" way, I just hope I didnt come off like that.
I was a guy who never gave a shit about nor wanted a typical "big wedding". But my wife wanted it to be something more than what I did and I am glad I acquiesced. Nothing better than helping to make your wife-to-be's dreams come true.
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Yo, since you're quoting terms I used back to me, let me point out that I never assigned gender roles here. The conventional wedding is something that both men and women (though, especially women) get pitched from birth. I certainly wasn't talking some bridezilla shit - I think the ways in which couples choose their wedding can be a result of personal desire or familial pressure or social conformity, or, in most cases, some combination.
Regardless, whatever issues I have with the modern wedding industry and social conventions shouldn't be construed as a critique on anyone's individual wedding steez. I've been to some great weddings that followed the conventional script. I've been to some great ones that totally went in a different direction.
As you point out, at the end of the day, what matters is what the bride and groom want for themselves (alas, I know too many couples who sacrificed that in order to please others, usually their family).
In any case, my original point though was to respond to Maru's suggestion that you need to lay out enough money to buy a new car in order to have a "half decent" wedding. This isn't going at Maru in any way but seriously, I call bullshit on that. If you want to have an open bar, have a catered dinner, rent out a ballroom, etc etc, then yes, it will be expensive. But none of that has much to do with having a "half decent" wedding.
A decent wedding is one where the couple and their guests have a good, memorable time. Money can't buy that.
I read that as $15,000 but then I realized, you probably meant 15,000 people.