Oh, I forgot: I won the money for our invitations on a football pool.
You’d be surprised. My husband and I originally wanted to invite 150 people, max, and get a total of about 70 guests. My father-in-law copied our invitations and sent them to an additional 450 peole. It was a cultural thing - in India, you invite pretty much everyone you know. In the U.S., you don’t. My mother was absolutely horrified, even though I waited until after the wedding to tell her. We wound up with more than double the guests we wanted, too, so wound up paying several thousand dollars more than intended. Fortunately, he contributed to the cost of the wedding; however, we still wound up paying $20K. Total, I’d say the wedding cost about $30K. For what it’s worth, I live in St. Louis and we had the wedding at a somewhat exclusive location because we liked the venue so much.
As someone who has had an incredibly expensive wedding, I would much rather have eloped and even suggested it to my husband several times, telling him that the cultural differences might cause some strain. He disagreed and both our families really wanted the wedding, so I figured what the hell?
Still, it would irritate me if someone looked down on me for having an expensive wedding. No one went into debt during the making of our wedding (no animals were harmed, either), we were still able to afford a spectacular 11-day honeymoon in Hawaii (again, fully-paid, no debt). Also, neither of us dipped into our other savings at all to pay for the event. The only reason we were able to do that is because we’re both borderline misers. Any extra at the end of the month is and always has been automatically distributed among savings accounts and investments.
Correction: capacity of the hall was 150, but we ended up with a hair short of 100. Other major cost-cutting moves: no DJ other than my iPod, and no flowers other than my bouquet (centerpieces were glass bowls with floating candles in them). We could have gone cheaper on food and booze by, well, buying cheaper food and booze, but decided that having really yummy food was really important to us.
It would have been really easy to end up with 200 people - we had to be really hard-nosed with the guest list, and probably 80% of the people there were family. (It’s amazing how quickly family add up, especially if you are one of the last in your generation to get hitched, because then all your cousins have spouses and kids.) For example, if just all my first cousins had come and brought their families, that would have been another 20 people or so. (None of them are local, so it would have involved plane tickets, hotels, etc. for them, which is the main reason many of them didn’t make it.) If it weren’t for the fact that almost none of either of our families are local, we would have had a REALLY hard time keeping the numbers down as far as they were.
We were poorish when we got married. All our wedding cost was the cost of the marriage licence and the rings. We were married at the local court house during the day with our immediate families and our two witnesses there. We couldn’t afford a big reception so I booked out a Lebanese restaurant for the reception. My wife and I had been living together for years and had no need of presents so we told people no gifts just pay your own way at the reception. We didn’t send out invitations just told all our friends and told them they could bring whoever they liked, kids, other friends, lovers whatever.
We ended up with a massive reception with all sorts of people there - old school friends we had forgotten about, people we used to work with and nearly every friend and relative we had. It was a wonderful night, we ate and drank until midnight. The restaurant staff loved it because when we passed the hat to collect for the bill numerous people insisted on paying for the bride and groom.
The nicest thing about the whole arrangement was not having to cull the invitations to keep below a budget. I don’t think I ever heard any regrets about missing the actual ceremony. People still talk about the reception to this day.
Ours was about £3000 for 75 guests. Reception was a sit-down meal at a country house hotel in north Wales, and that took the bulk of the cost.
There’s no telling yet.
I’m just planning mine as we speak, and…excreting a bit of masonry. 
Altogether, it should run to about £400 including venue, rings, clothing and drinks. Some good friends of ours are cooking for the reception/party. There’ll be between 20 and 25 people, depending on whether distant friends can make it.
Hubby and I got married in November - I was pushing for a JOP wedding and restaurant dinner afterwards, but he wanted a ceremony, because he had done the courthouse wedding before. It was still pretty cheap:
My dress: 9.99 at Goodwill, plus $16.00 for alterations. Maybe another $15.00 for undergarments.
Rings: Mine = engagement ring from his grandmother, plus $39.00 slim band to match; His = $60 to have my father’s band sized.
His suit: About $325, including alterations. (Most expensive part of the entire day, other than food, but he needed a good suit.)
License: $20.00
Ceremony: Performed by his department chaplain, at a beautiful little country church. Attendants were my son and daughter, and his dog. Cost of their attire: About $100. (Including $10.00 for the dog’s bow tie. Hubby wasn’t sure about having his K9 as part of the wedding, but I was determined that the entire new family be included. Fortunately, the preacher agreed with me and wanted the dog included.) Gratuities for church and minister: $100.
Reception: Wonderful lunch in my mom’s back yard. My mother is one of those southern ladies who never met anyone she didn’t want to feed. She spent about $350 on a great meal for 50. Leftovers were used for my dad’s later-in-the-evening poker game with his buddies.
Honeymoon: Hubby and I spent a couple of nights on a nearby island. I used my employee rate to get the resort hotel for $39.00 per night. A dear friend gave us a gift certificate for a lovely dinner that evening, and another gave us room service brunch the next day. We probably spent $20.00 in gasoline.
So total was about US $1100 for rings, clothes, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon.
My husband got a real bargain!
These threads scare me. I’d like nothing more than to have a low-key wedding (if/when the time comes) but my parents are pretty traditional and Korea weddings are all about inviting every single person you and your parents know. Definitely not what I want, but I have an awful feeling my parents will manage to guilt me into it.
Ours cost $40 at the county clerk’s office in Lurray Virginia; we then had a nice lunch that probably cost another $40.
One day I will get around to it.
Our wedding in 2005 cost about 40k. That’s including the erings and gold set I wore, two different wedding gown outfits plus matching jewelry. I had 90 people there and it was during a blizzard in January but everyone came. I think the wedding itself was about 12k. Honeymoon was a road trip along highway 1 from California to Washington.
Indian weddings, too. That’s why we ended up having one civil wedding, primarily for our friends and my in-laws’ friends, and a slightly smaller Hindu wedding with everyone my parents know, and their dogs.
There was a little bit of vague stuff about God in the ceremony, mostly for the benefit of my mother-in-law and her brother. Originally, we were going to have a Methodist officiant and a Hindu one, but the wife thought her uncle might freak out if he was forced to listen to dirty heathen talk.
Plus, it would have looked really weird to have a Methodist preacher in a collar and a pandit in a loincloth standing together.
Probably less than a grand. My dress was 120 dollars (a regular dress-length thing, wasn’t marketed as a wedding dress). Whatever the license and JofP fees were. And a nice luncheon at a restaurant for the 20ish attendees. We didn’t do the big fancy bridesmaids/church/huge reception, obviously.
After 27 years we’re still happily married. My brother, who was married a month earlier in the big-deal ceremony… not so much (they divorced 5ish years ago). I think our cost/benefit ratio is higher than theirs, obviously.
I think that’s definitely the way to go. We had a Hindu ceremony and Unitarian ceremony the same day. It was exhausting. I got up at 6:30 that morning to start preparations and we didn’t get to our hotel until 2 a.m. the next morning. We had the most compressed version of the Hindu ceremony (just did the seven steps part, which reduced about four days to two hours), then the Unitarian (which took about 20 minutes), then the reception and dancing. I had both a sari and a wedding dress, so there was a wardrobe change between ceremonies during which we had a cocktail hour with appetizers and an open bar. My feet and legs were killing me by the time we went to sleep and I was so tired I was twitchy.
I think I would have shot myself if we’d done both on the same day, even though we had the two hour version as well.
Along with the seven steps, we had the “hiding bride and groom from one another with a cloth” bit, the exchange of garlands, parents anointing us with tilaka, and much chanting in Sanskrit. Oh, and all the guests blessed her mangal sutra, which everyone seemed to think was cool.
I made a deal with my parents: if they want us to have a big, traditional-style wedding, they can pay for it and I will gladly attend; otherwise, I will have a small ceremony that we (my wife and I) could afford, without going into debt, to which only close relations and our close friends would be invited.
They wanted the bigger ceremony to which they could invite all of thier friends and relations that they knew; so they agreed to pay.
Looks like you are actually in Korea, so this may not work for you, but our trick for dealing with crazy Korean parents was to a) have the wedding where we live, across the US from where my parents live, thus severely limiting the number of people my parents could invite that would actually come (though we still got the odd second cousin here and there), b) even though we had to invite more people and have a more floofy wedding than we wanted, we also made time for more low-key events we enjoyed more, like having a “wedding luncheon” with just the wedding party (in the US this usually is the “rehearsal dinner,” but my mom was ADAMANT that we invite all out-of-town people so it became almost as large as the actual wedding), c) gave my mom random small things to do (e.g., she was in charge of the favors) so as to minimize the amount of time she could stress about stuff, and d) suck it up for, lessee, 4 1/2 years and counting as my mom, to this day, talks about how much better it would have been if she had been able to mastermind the whole thing and have everyone she knew come.
You might also be able to make a destination wedding work. My quasi-traditional Korean parents also (as far as I can tell this is also traditional for Koreans) like to show they have nice stuff, and thought it would be totally cool for us to have a wedding in Hawaii or something like that.
ETA: Malthus, your strategy didn’t quite work for us. We asked that we be able to pay for the wedding, but it came down to my dad feeling like it was his duty, and it would have hurt him more not to. Korean parents are weird.
We had the same, though my guests didn’t bless the mangal sutra. And, yeah, I was done with the whole thing by the end of the day. And I was certainly damn sure I was married.
I’m thinking $12.50. It has been quite a few decades. Less than $20, I’m sure.