This must not be in the South. First Saturday of college football season.
That was painful to even skim, trying to see if it went anywhere.
Took a long time to get to his point but it is worth it. We've tried to past this advise on to a number of people but to no avail. Lot of money for little benefit.
The funny thing is, he’s Catholic, so the quickie Vegas wedding is out for him, personally (wedding banns for starters). My wife and I took a lot of his advice (boombox for the music, though, no iPods yet). My wife and her sisters made the cake, a fruitcake. I was not-thrilled with the idea of fruitcake, but it turns out THAT is the traditional wedding cake. BTW, fruitcake does not have to be made nasty. The one made for our wedding was palatable.
Because of extreme distance, we got a waiver for the prep course, and were allowed individual private exams by our respective priests... much better.
As a general rule of thumb, there is an inverse relationship between the expense of the reception and the longevity of the marriage (in a civil sense, all validly contractyed marriages betwen Christians are indissoluble until death).
We took care of everything ourselves. A friend took pictures for me in black & white for archival purposes...color doesn’t last. Set up my stereo for music. Decorated ourselves. Relatives prepared the meal. My wife was catholic and she converted to true Christianity. Nearing 30 years married. Marriage has been HARD work for many reasons and has worked out okay, but, I’m never doing this again.
We managed to have a simple yet meaningful wedding. A friend had an over the top wedding a few weeks before with many of the same guests. People were telling us how much fun our wedding was for years.
We did it for about $2000
First, Mazel Tov to the soon-to-be-newlyweds.
Second, I can tell you this ... as long as you can make a joke about any troublesome time, keep that going. The other side of that coin, well, you can figure that out.
How do i know? I’m a Viet vet. I’m a cancer survivor, complete with ‘appliance’, and i don’t mean a kitchen one. I’m a Hurricane Katrina survivor. (After seeing a 25 foot Ryder truck bounce down the street, one wonders who the poor soul would be, who would end up renting ‘that’ one!) I had three complete career changes, including a rocket scientist (I became allergic to the clean room white suit).
Third, yes everybody, there is ‘someone’ that is put on this Earth for you. 15 years, amid mortality’s frailties, and still going. I asked ‘that’ question, and she said ‘no’.
I wish you two well.
Don’t put “Hillary Clinton” and “up skirting” in the same paragraph!
My wedding 33 years ago:
$25 - Pastor
$25 - Organist
$25 - Church Janitor
$25 - Church General fund
$250 - Cream colored wool Pendleton skirt/suit for the bride (she used it for many other occasions after our wedding)
$0 - Three piece suit for me, already owned by me.
$0 - Wedding cake made by my best friend’s sister as her gift to us.
$0 - Sandwich fixings and other food/soft drinks supplied by my parents as their gift to us.
$0 - Booze supplied by my older brother as his gift to us.
$0 - Reception held at my home (I purchased it from my parents when they retired).
About 25 guests and everybody commented how great and fun the whole day was.
We spent about $400.00, so in today's money that probably about $1,200...
The idiot TV shows about weddings is what really got the ball spinning out of control...
People spending six months salary on just the dress only...you have to be really, really stupid to do that..
Over the top wedding day ceremonies costing 10's of thousands of dollars...
Diamond Rings that run several thousands dollars...
I married off two daughters, give them a $5,000 budget...
I told them if they can't get married for $5,000, they would need to cover the rest...
BTW, I only bought my beautiful bride a diamond ring for our 20th anniversary, when I could afford it...
She wears it over her simple gold ring I put on her finger the day I married her...
My suggestion, is real simple...make a budget and stick it...you can have a beautiful wedding with all the bells and whistles for about $8,000...
If the bride doesn't go out of her mind...
Oh' buy some duct tape for the bridesmaids mouths, they have lots of very expensive ideas, of course they aren't paying for it..
Later
Cue the 4 Yorkies! Mr. Hunter’s parents blew $150? My parents were sinfully rich, Mommy had a ballroom in her house, and they didn’t throw a reception.
When anyone talks about going into hock for a fairytale wedding, she delivers such a rant. Better than even her college rant or her mortgage rant!
The wedding industry is ridiculous. I was a part of it as a dj for a number of years long ago. There were good and bad ones. The simple ones are the best. Fewer things to be potentially screwed up. And almost every one had screwups about something. If you did not have a sense of humour about things you were in for an awful day.
My oldest daughters have decided on a cheap wedding and any money that would have been spent, put down on a house. Sounds like a good plan to me....if we can still afford it after putting 5 kids through college and grad school. They may be getting married in the backyard. I promise to put the dogs up.
First, a horror story. One of my best friends raised a daughter. He spent over $60,000 sending her to a four-year college. As soon as she finished, she decided to get married so he had to spend another $30,000 on a wedding. Well, maybe he didn't have to spend that much but as pointed out in the article, it doesn't take much to run up the cost of even an average wedding.
But here's the punchline. Within three years, her marriage fell apart and now she's living back at home with two children. So the poor guy spend about $100,000 to get her educated and out of the house and now she's right back under his roof where she started.
Makes me glad I had two sons and no daughters!
When I got married back in the 1980s, I would have been perfectly fine eloping for a weekend in Las Vegas. Have an Elvis impersonator do the wedding and then party down at the Circus Circus or Caesers Palace. I would have been fine with that. I would have had cheap champagne poured in the bathtub and rose petals dumped in the bedsheets. After all, I'm a romantic kind of guy.
But my wife would have none of that. Instead, it was the full Italian wedding experience from soup to nuts. Right down to the chicken dance at the reception. It was a year of hell preparing for that one day. Well, mostly hell for my bride-to-be and my future mother-in-law. I let them deal with all the nonsense of lining up photographers and deciding what color the flower arrangement would be and all that other stuff.
I just told them to let me know what time to show up and what to wear. So I got off pretty easily. But I think even back then, it was a $50,000 wedding. This was back in the mid 1980s so a lot of money.
What a racket.
Mrs L is in the “wedding industry” and believe me that’s exactly what it is.
Her advice:
Invite 5 or 6 close friends and immediate family.
Put all the rest of the cash into a down payment on a house.
L
Another witness to the theory that simpler weddings equal longer marriages... We’ve been married 34 years and we had a very small, simple church ceremony and very simple reception In a condo community room. It was still one of the best days of my life.
If I get married, which I doubt, it would be to theorist girlfriend. One ceremony inland for her family, one in Cali for mine. I never understood the huge effort that some put in to weddings.