What do you think about a bride’s parents spending $65,000 on a wedding?
My brother is getting married in June and his fiancee’s parents are dropping $65,000 on the affair. I was stunned by the amount. What are your reactions?
I am not sure where all that money is going… I know that her dress is about $5,000, and the reception is at a pretty upper-crusty place. They are having it catered with a four-course dinner, at approximately $70 a person (200 guests, for a total of $14,000). There will be an open bar, and a band. I am assuming a good amount is going towards a professional photographer.
My initial thoughts are this: I think you could spend one-third that amount and still have a great wedding. Does anyone really care about eating a fancy four-course meal for $70 a plate? Wouldn’t people be just as happy with a buffet catered by a barbeque place?
I don’t know… I just think about how $65,000 is way more than most people make in an entire year. Is it too extravagant?
I suppose if they have the money and aren’t going into the poor house for the affair, then more power to them.
Personally, I think it’s silly. When the time comes, I’d prefer a small wedding on the beach- some place where all our guests can spend the week or weekend on a fun vacation with us. I can’t even fathom wasting $65k on a wedding, when we could spend no more than 10k (that’d be super high end fancy for me) and use the remaining $55k for a sweet down payment on a house. Or paying off student loans. Or something more productive than 5 hours of entertainment.
I’m sorry - no offense intended, but when I read about a wedding that costs that much, I wonder “how much will the divorce cost?”
My wedding cost lest that $300 and I’ve been marrried over 18 years.
Do they already own a house? Are their cars paid off? Or do they both have over-the-top jobs? Financial stress is one of the leading causes of divorce.
I guess I just see that much money for a wedding as wasted.
The bride and groom own a house (have a mortgage), have cars on which they are paying (as in, they don’t own them outright), they each have good jobs: he makes about $100,000 a year and she makes about $60,000. I have no idea if they are contributing any of their own money to the wedding.
It’s safe to say that her parents are very well off, although to what extent I don’t know.
I guess I would rather have $20,000 wedding and put the extra $45,000 into a savings account or into investments, or a down payment on a house.
It seems stupid, shallow, and wasteful to me, but it’s their money.
I’m reminded of an episode of Bridezillas where the nuptially-inclined couple took out a second mortgage on their house to pay for their wedding. The final cost was something like $70,000. I keep hoping Oxygen will start filming Bridezilla follow-ups, showing who’s still married after a year and who’s divorced.
<young curmudgeon>
When I got married, I got married in a field. Well, okay, in a clearing in the woods.
</young curmudgeon>
As **Diosa **says, it depends on how well off they are, I guess. I suppose the roughly $100 spent on my wedding (dress, veil, - food was potluck) was a lot of money for some folks. It was about 1/3 of my weekly pay at the time, and I could have afforded more had I wanted to - but we still rent and have student loans I’d rather pay. For Paris Hilton, $65,000 would be rather equivalent to my $100, I bet.
Marry me. I don’t want to wear a tux at my wedding, I want to wear sunblock.
On the other hand, 65k might not be too much for a wedding, provided that the lion’s share is spent on the band. I think a Led Zeppelin reunion at a wedding would rock.
If they have the money to spend and it’s what they want, more power to 'em.
Still, if I was that bride and groom, I’d take the $65,000, spend maybe $15,000 of it on a still-quite-luxurious wedding and honeymoon, and pocket the rest.
I put in a zip code for Arlington VA at www.costofwedding.com and they say the average wedding in that area costs $40,980. So the $65k is certainly a good bit higher than average but if they (meaning her parents) can afford it and they want to give her a wedding of that caliber, then I would have no issue with it.
Now, if they got into the realm of this wedding that would be different.
One thing about a wedding like that is that the bride and her mother are going to be expecting perfection. A perfect day where nothing goes wrong. And that’s unrealistic. Something always goes wrong. As an end result, it’s going to be the worst day of the bride’s life. Nothing but stress.
That’s why the idea of a simple wedding appeals to me. When you have few expectations, there’s little that can go wrong.
IMO, it’s their wedding, and I decided long ago that the only people with a right to an opinion are the bride, the groom, and (to a much lesser extent) whoever has the checkbook. Who cares if they could have spent the money on a down payment for a house? They didn’t want to. They wanted to have a fancy party, and that says exactly nothing about the strength (or lack thereof) of their relationship. A taste for fancy food does not equal shallow and unlikely to be happy any more than a taste for BBQ automatically equals likely to last.
Of course, if they’re bankrupting their parents, that’s not so great, but this is generally not the case. My friend recently married a North Jersey girl whose parents had big time money. They spent, if I had to guess, close to $100,000 on the wedding. So what? The amount sounds enormous to me, but I bought a big television last year that cost me an amount that probably sounds like a lot of money to some people. $100,000 to my friend’s wife’s parents is the same as that amount was to me - a sizable chunk of money, but not so obscene an amount to spend on a luxury that will bring enjoyment to the family.
Now in your brother’s case, I am more weirded out by the figures you quote. They’re doing this at an upper-crusty kind of place with a table service dinner and open bar and managing at $70 a head? The vast majority of wedding expenses are usually the per-head costs, because the location takes care of a lot of incidental expenses. I can’t understand how you can make a $65,000 wedding on 200 guests at $70 a head.
I’m looking at the prospects of what the wedding that I want will cost, and I’m not too happy with the results in this area. (Seriously, $80/plate at a small, cheesy golf club? Are you out of your mind? $3500 just to rent the space in a small museum with great atmosphere? OMFG!) I’m prepared to do a lot of DIY stuff, partially because I don’t want to pay an exorbitant amount for things and partially because there’s not a whole lot of things out there that I like. (Invitations, dress, etc. will more than likely be designed or made by me. Not making the dress, but I’m more than likely going to go to a seamstress to get a personalized knockoff of the dress that’s gorgeous but too expensive. Not sure whether I’ll be designing AND printing off the invites; if I don’t print them, VistaPrint will.)
That said, $65,000 is a LOT for a wedding, but it can definitely produce a nice, opulent, beautiful wedding with little stress to the bride and others involved in the planning. If they can afford to drop that much on one day of events without putting anyone in the poorhouse, then good for them.
Is it too extravagant? Hell yes. Is a 5000 square foot house for a family of three extravagant? Hell yes. Is it my business? Unfortunately, no. I am opposed to conspicuous consumption, but I can’t do much about other people indulging in it.
That figure is probably just for the food. Add the site rental fee, open bar, band, photographer, plus the cost for tuxes, and a $15K wedding dress (or more), and I can easily see it totalling up to $65K.
First reaction–who are these people? I mean, Heather Renee French and Steve Henry (that would be a newly former Miss America and the Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky–at the time. ) had an extravagent wedding, but it’s hard to blame them. Still, if you have 3 wedding cakes and 3 first dances so that everyone at the reception gets to see it, there’s something kind of goofy about it. (I’d bet the French-Henry wedding cost more tha $65K, I just don’t know how much more.)
Second reaction–Are they going into debt? Postponing buying a house? Affecting someone’s abilty to retire? If the answer to all three questions is “no” then I guess it’s their choice.
Third reaction–That’s a lot of money to spend on stuff that doesn’t mean that much to me. About 10% of that sounds reasonable–I’ll stretch it to $10K, but after that, I think I could find different uses for the money.
Fourth reaction: The comment upthread about the cost of Divorce is only too worth considering. I don’t assume that all weddings, even expensive ones lead to divorce, but on the other hand, when one pours that many buckets of money at the wedding, one does wonder how much attention is being given to the rest of the marriage.
