How much did your wedding cost?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Happened to us. I just have an assload of aunts and uncles, who in turn produced an assload of cousins, on both sides of my family. And they’re all married, and all have kids, and all live far away. Sure, we could have said “no kids”, but then many of them wouldn’t have been able to come, and we did want them to be able to make it. So that gang, plus his family, plus a handful of friends and guests on either side, added up to just over 200.

And since 95% of these people were making long trips to be there - most were “only” halfway across the country, though a few were coming in from other countries - we didn’t feel right just having a cake-and-punch (or beer-and-snacks) reception. So we had a really nice dinner, and good drinks. The venue didn’t cater, so we found our own caterer, and we bought our own alcohol and saved a ton.

And we tried not to inconvenience any of the guests any more than necessary, because so many of them were coming so far and spending so much just to be there. So we paid for the wedding party’s dresses and ties, and we hired a bus to take folks from the hotel to the wedding and back again so they wouldn’t have to rent cars (and wouldn’t wind up driving drunk). We basically didn’t want people to have to do anything other than show up.

But we’re actually pretty frugal, so everything else, we saved as much as we could. I made my dress and all the decorations, we printed the invitations, my husband coordinated all the music on his iPod, we went with the cheapest photographer we could find, we got our cake at the grocery store, we had it way, way off-season, etc. All told, it still came in at around $30,000, I think. This was a few years ago, in the DC area. But that was for literally everything, from engagement ring to honeymoon, every last ribbon, favor, and song download.

And we covered it all ourselves, with no debt! Woo-hoo!

22

Somewhere between 23-30K depending on what you include as part of the wedding. Reception was about 14K of that and was for about 150 people.

We’re still paying off some of our portion of that. ouch.

Oh. SUPER easy. You’ll find out. :wink: We had to prune a lot to get it down to 150.

It’s not just your friends, but all your parents friends, some of your sibling’s friends, etc. Your parents feel obligated to invite everyone who invited them to their children’s weddings and by the time you get that old that’s a lot of weddings you’ve been to.
You can say no of course to your parents’ lists, but if they’re paying a big chunk of the reception…

If your policy is to have a +1 invite for everyone, boom, your list just doubled.

23

We did the Star Trek wedding in Vegas, paid for hotel and airfare for six people, plus their wedding clothes. Had a separate reception at a hall for about 150 people, with food and booze. Cost about $8500 total.

I can imagine paying more than that, and we had a great, elegant wedding reception. I bought a “last season” dress ($400), had all silk flowers (great jewel tones from Hobby Lobby) except for the wedding - that was included in the $2000 wedding package at the Hilton. I made all of my centerpieces (based on Goddesses of Love/Fertility), made the cake topper (with matching silk flowers) and the card box - a triple tier of paper-mache, covered with a woven satin ribbon pattern. I designed my invites, had them professionally printed, and put them together myself - a small booklet with handmade pressed petal paper cover, bound with a small ribbon. My guest favors were mini-bottles of Korbel champagne, with a small printed tag, with cropped corners and tied with a bow. Add some clear lights and candles, and that’s it!

I encourage you to look at all of your (less expensive) options - that $15,000 you save will be far more valuable down the road, and your family may appreciate it as well.

24

I have only the one brother and the standard two parents, but I have one grandparent, twelve aunts and uncles (each parents has a sister and two brothers, all married) fourteen first cousins who have about fourteen kids between them (and at least seven partners), plus my brother’s wife and their two kids… what are we up to? 53ish? And that’s without inviting a single friend, colleague, neighbour or any of the groom’s family - or the groom! - not to mention the other acquaintances in life that you might feel obligated to invite along. If we were church people it would probably blow out even further from there. We’re not even what I’d consider to be a big family. I could see how it could easily jump to huge numbers, particularly if you’re from a large, close family. My God, if I had to invite my mother’s cousins it would get insane. She has thirty-four first cousins from her father’s parents alone, and between them they have more than seventy children (not to mention about thirty-two spouses)!

Edited to add: My wedding cost $5,000 (Australian) in 2001. $75,000? That just seems obscene.

25 
I have  two parents,  two sisters and a brother. Add SO's and we're up to 8. Grandparents make 10. Aunts and uncles- now we're up to 18. My first cousins-there are 12 of them, but only 8 were old were for SO's at the time - total of 38. Add my (Italian) mother's 40 first cousins and their spouses and we're up to 118. Four of their kids and spouses and we're up to 126. About 30 members of my husbands family brings it to 156 or so ,and the rest of the 220 were either our friends or my parents' friends ( a few) . But wait, there's more- that was just the first reception. My husbands' (Chinese) family is just as big , and that reception had about 200 people with an overlap of maybe 40 people who attended both.
26

Cazzle, Doreen,

What is it with mothers’ cousins?

I can understand the motivation of people who are close and their spouses but what about the others? Free meal, booze and party? 200-300 people can’t feel close to you.

27

Some people are close to their parent’s cousins. We’re not - my mother knows only a handful of her cousins and even then not well. She’d be hard pressed to recognise any of them, I think. However, my ex is from an even bigger family and much, much closer to that extended family. One of his (many) great aunts had 11 children (all married… all with children…) and they frequently had family events that everyone attended. We could have felt an obligation to invite them based on our social interactions with them.

Incidentally, I felt like you do, MichaelEmouse. I didn’t see the point in spending mega-thousands on meals for people we hardly knew. We opted to offend everyone equally and invited only 20 or 30 people to our wedding. The cousins that we invited were invited because they were our friends, not our relatives.

28

Maybe her mom wants her to invite them?

My own mom’s family is Irish Catholic and if I had a wedding and invited everyone I consider my family, it’d be my aunts and uncles and cousins and their spouses and SOs - about twenty people. But if I know my mom (and I do), she’d start insisting that I invite her cousins and their children. Many of these people I literally don’t know at all (because they live in Nebraska, where I’ve never been in my life) but my mom would only find it polite.

29

This is what I was going to say - weddings are a bit of a thing. The only reason there were only 50 people at our wedding is because I’m a hard-assed bitch. Seriously, hubby and I made the guest list, prepared the invitations and suddenly MIL had a big list of people that HAD to be invited, and they’ll be SO HURT if they’re not invited, and they’re not going to come anyway, and blah, blah, blah.

Well, I totally shut her down and said it’s my wedding, I’ve never met this person, hubby hasn’t seen them since he was two and they’re not invited, period. We will send a wedding announcement and some pictures, but that it. Period. Final. End of discussion.

Most people aren’t quite that…crabby. My mother knew better than to even ask.

Honestly, hubby and I were footing the bill so NO ONE was going to be pushing us into going into debt so they could invite some long lost cousin.

FWIW, my best friend was bullied into having about 200 guests at her wedding, was miserable and resents the whole thing to this day. I may have annoyed my MIL (hehe - MAY!) but I got to have the wedding I wanted, hubby and I aren’t in debt over the whole thing, and MIL got over it.

30

Mine cost about $25,000 six years ago. We had 110 guests and paid for most of it ourselves - my mother bought my wedding dress ($1,500) and my dad chipped in $3000. We could have done it for less - we had it at the nicest hotel in the city (IMHO), didn’t skimp on the food, cake or flowers, and had a full open bar. It was in a smaller city, however, so that probably kept the cost down.

The reception is generally the biggest cost, and there are lots of ways you can do it nicely on your proposed budget.

31

About $5000 for approximately 100 people in Indiana in 1996. In addition to food and stuff, this included my dress, the groom’s tux, dresses for the 5 bridesmaids and tuxes for the 5 groomsmen.

The main ways we saved money:

  • Had the wedding and reception at a local restaurant that was also a historic mansion. Use of the house for the morning and afternoon (the restaurant was only open for dinner on Saturdays) was $100, plus they already have all the dishes and linens and stuff and didn’t charge us to rent them. Plus plus the place was gorgeous, so we didn’t have to spend much on flowers to dress it up.
  • Got married just before noon and had a lunch reception = cheaper food.
  • No alcohol. With a lunch reception it really wasn’t odd that it was missing, and while we went alcohol free for other reasons it ended up being a lot cheaper.
  • No DJ or band. A friend played the piano for the ceremony, but there was no dancing allowed in the house due to structural concerns - so we ate and visited and then (most) everyone went away.

Because we went alcohol- and dancing-free for the reception, we gathered our wedding party and friends a couple of hours later that night to go out drinking and dancing. We got tons of compliments about the beautiful wedding, with many people even mentioning that it was nice to be there, celebrate, and then be able to leave and do other things :slight_smile:

My words of advice are these: Your wedding day will be meaningful and important and beautiful, and you should make sure you do and have the things that matter most to you. Remember, though, that it is only ONE day of your marriage - and it probably won’t be the most meaningful and important day you two will have together!

32

All told, a bit over $10K, in the NYC area. 80 person wedding, at an aquarium that handled all the catering, liquor, cake, and rentals (tables, linens, etc) in-house. For NYC it was a VERY good deal (especially the open bar, which was only $10/head!!). It was important to us to not make things inconvenient for guests, so the venue had to be on public transportation and have inexpensive hotels nearby. For that, Long Island was pretty much a slam dunk over having it in NYC. (My parents BITCHED and MOANED about how horrible it was to not have it in NYC – ie, force guests to spend $300/night in NYC hotel – because of the EXPERIENCE they would be MISSING… whatever).

Most of it went to the venue. I bought my dress at Target ($159), we did our own music, and I did all the flowers myself. Favors were farmstand apples with wee jars of honey (we got married the sunday before Rosh Hashanah). ETA - we did our own music for the reception but I splurged on a string quartet for the ceremony. It was very nice .

We could have done it cheaper, in theory, but as I was in law school at the time, I didn’t have time for more DIY elements than I already had committed to. We could have invited fewer people, in theory, but we wanted our friends there. At the end of the day, we had a great time, and people still tell us how much fun they had (we’ve been married almost 2 years).

OP, my brother got married at a city-owned estate in Oakland, the Dunsmuir estate. It was lovely, and they had 200 people. They looked into getting married at the Chabot Space Center (I think in the Astronomy Hall), but my sister-in-law wasn’t feeling it. :slight_smile: It looks cool though.

33

First off, congratulations! I hadn’t heard that you were engaged!

We got married in Calgary in 2002, and it cost (if I remember correctly) a total of $6000 for 20 people (including rings). The biggest expense was our caterer, and the food wasn’t all that special. We did a lot of things ourself, too, and didn’t have a super-fancy wedding, and it still cost thousands of dollars. Your venue will probably be your biggest expense, especially if they included the catering and booze. One thing you can do to cut costs is try to not get wedding-specific stuff; as soon as you put a wedding sticker on something, the price doubles. If you want silver balloons, just get silver balloons at a dollar store; don’t buy them at a wedding supply store, for example.

One thing I’ll warn you about; you won’t have anywhere near enough time to spend time with all of 200-250 guests. Unless you feel for some reason you need your wedding to be that big, I’d pare it down. Spending thousands to feed people you hardly know isn’t my idea of a good time.

34
35

Spent about $10K in 1995, for 200-250 or so guests. (I have 4 siblings, and he had 6, so once siblings and their spouses/SOs and kids were counted, that was about 70 people right there, plus aunts, uncles, and only adult cousins, we were pushing 150.) The marriage lasted a whopping 16 months.

Spent about $140 in 2006, if you include the pizza we ordered for lunch at home right after the private ceremony. Still happily married.

36

I once attended a wedding with more than 1,000 guests.

It was due to a combination of two factors. First of all, the bride was part of a very large family: She was the youngest of nine (I think) siblings, most of whom were already married and had children. So just the invited famiily was enough to make it a big wedding.

On top of that, the bride’s father was a prominent rabbi in a major New York City synagogue. So of course everybody in the congregation had to get an invitation. That really made the headcount explode.

ETA: I was there because I was the cousin of the groom, and very close to him actually.

37

Well, actually, I do feel close to them. I grew up seeing them all the time and continued to see them all the time after I got married. When I was a kid I saw them on holidays- everything from Christmas to Labor Day to block parties. I was one of the oldest of my generation, and the holidays had to stop as the family got bigger, so I don’t really know some of the younger second cousins. But I do know the ones my age, and still keep in touch with them. My uncle bought a house in the neighborhood where many of his cousins lived, so I saw them whenever I was at my uncle’s house. I went to high school in that neighborhood, and ran into them on the street and I later bought a house in the same neighborhood and still run into them all the time. Good thing my father had a small and not particularly close family.

38

About…$2,000 including engagement ring, wedding ring, wedding breakfast at Denny’s. We eloped, got married in the parlor of the judge, had two witnesses, wore our best work clothes, no honeymoon (had that before the wedding). Married 23 years now, so it must have ‘took’. If I had to do it today, I would put on the whole thing using items found at the Dollar Store (wedding gown made from tablecloths, artificial flowers, jewelry? Hmm…it CAN be done, I’ve seen a gown made from this online. STUNNING!) Canapes? check. (crackers, cheese spread, canned smoked oysters, beef jerky, pickles…). Cake? check. (cake mix, frosting, cake pans, decorations). Beverages? check. (soda, water, fruity juices, ice cube trays - no booze, alas, BYOB). Main course: spaghetti? tuna noodle casserole? some dollar stores have frozen food…I think it would be a Hoot!

39

I had around 300, IIRC.

My husband’s mom was one of 11, his father was one of 8 (and one of his brothers had 14 kids (though only 11 were born at the time of my wedding)), my father was one of 7, and my mother was one of 2. Just first cousins alone added up to nearly 150. And I wouldn’t have had a reception without my family there, kids included.

My husband and I got engaged right out of college and by the time the wedding took place we’d both started our “career” jobs. That meant inviting people from our old work and our new work.

All told we invited about 350 and 300 showed up.

My wedding budget was $5000, back when $5000 was the norm for a middle class family. We had a buffet reception.

40

Around $15k, probably more like $17k, five years ago in a fairly expensive part of SoCal, for around 100 people. (plus $5k for the 50-person rehearsal dinner my mom HAD to have.) Having it in CA made it rather more expensive than it could have been. My parents live in a small town in NC and to this day she still talks about how she could have done it at the Country Club for 200 people for less than $10k. (Discounting the part where we didn’t want it in NC, we didn’t want to invite all 200 of my mom’s closest-and-not-so-close-but-who-once-invited-her-to-a-wedding-and-by-God-she’s-going-to-get-back-the-cost-of-that-present friends, and the Country Club food isn’t actually all that good (my mom can’t tell, she thinks it’s gourmet)).

We had a nice caterer/location and a nice photographer and skimped on everything else, including no alcohol (my family doesn’t drink for religious reasons and mr. hunter’s family was nice enough not to care.) and no dancing; my sister did my makeup; I made my own wedding jewelry; etc. I am of two minds about the caterer. On one hand the rational part of my brain realizes that was a lot of money to spend on food that probably no one remembers except for me. On the other hand I am still happy we gave people a nice high-quality meal and not the normal rubber chicken.

My sister’s St Louis wedding was around $20k for more like 130 (I think?) people, and was a bit nicer than ours.