to think people should not choose to get married abroad and expect everyone to come to their wedding!

[shebird]

My sister has just announced that she is getting married in Italy next year and wants all the family to join her for the wedding. Normally this would not be a HUGE issue but DH and I have already booked and paid for our holiday the month before Arghhhhhh!

We were trying to be organised and book early so we could cheap flights in school holidays and it gives us almost a year to save etc. Its the only way we can afford to do it.There is no way we can afford do both the holiday and the wedding. Our flights are non refundable so not an option to cancel.

I feel really bad and I know my sister will be very cross if Im not there. But part of me thinks its all very well getting married abroad but people should consider that the expense for everyone to get there is huge. In these times when money is tight it really is a big ask.

I accept that us having booked our holiday was just bad luck but I know there are other family members, including my parents who will really have struggle to get there. Of course its their wedding and they should do it their way but also dont expect people to pay a few grand to be there on the day!

YANBU, its very selfish to get married abroad and put the costs of the wedding basically on the guests. If you want to get married abroad and have guests you should pay for them to attend in full.

lazylass
I agree advance booking and low fares can produce some great deals if you can be flexible about your dates and your destination. Advance booking means we have a almost a year to save for the family holiday we have booked. We can JUST about afford to put a little aside each month to afford this but it will be a big struggle. Especially now that the washing machine has packed up :(

Cost is a very valid excuse for those of us without much to spare. I would love to go to the wedding and I am not 'looking for excuses'. If I can find a way to go I will but it will probably be with without DH and DCs. My point was that those having weddings abroad should be more considerate of the cost it will involve family & friends to get there.

Also I have costed the trip with 'low fares' airlines and including hotels, spending money etc. we will need at least £1,200 just for 3 days! I am a dab hand at trawling the net for deals (its how we can afford our family holiday) so I am willing to put in the effort. Not many people can afford to spend that sort of money at the best of times, but most would struggle the month after they return from holiday at the same time as buying school shoes, uniform etc. for kids returning to school. I think you must be very well off or a bit la la to think otherwise.

I would ignore her comments. I think she is deliberately trying to wind you up.

Opps bit of a typo there lassylass...lazylass think that says it all really!

You must have great time with all that dosh and childcare on tap. Lucky you:o

The typo is OK. I'm just happy that you listened to reason and not the drone of bridezilla noise trotted out by others (who seem to think their family and friends dont know when they are making half-arsed excuses).

Try Ryanair a little closer to when you need to leave for better than 1200! And IMO do 1 day not 3 if you want to make a point.

Happy she listened to reason? Presumably you mean other reasoning and not your own (dubious) Lassy?! 1 day for a wedding in Italy. How would that work then? Presumably you mean for the OP to travel on here own and only attend part of the event?

BTW - you haven't answered my questions. How many children do you have and what would you do about childcare for 2/3 days if all of your family were at a wedding?

Since when has a]not having the odd spare grand lying about and b] an army of willing babysitters being a halfarsed excuse?

A few hours ago further up the thread when Lassy decreed it so

I think Lassy is maybe one of those bridezillas herself. She maybe thought it was such a privelege for her guests to attend her wedding that they would all happily pay thousands, do without their own family holidays, and leave their children for days on end. Just for the privelege and honour of 'being part of her special day'.

Not unreasonable at all to miss it for this. Tell your sister now- tell your parents and other sister you aren't going to go, it might help them if they are struggling to decide if they can afford it or not.

Not everyone can just find that sort of money. It cost £150 to hire a nanny for the day for BIL's 'suddenly childfree a couple weeks before the date' wedding. This was my 'new summer wardrobe' money, spent on a nanny for their weekday wedding. I resented that everytime I had to put on old summer clothes that weren't really fitting this summer. That was just £150 (before the gifts costs and our costs getting to/from the venue).

Imagine what you could do with £1200 - quite frankly, I'd rather send a nice gift and get a new dining table or sofa. Imagine any other event in your life you'd invited someone too and expected them to spend £1200? If you were throwing any other event and knew it was going to cost £1200 would you be all that shocked when most non-minted people would say no?

OP - it's your sister's big day, it makes sense she might want to spend a lot of money and make sacrifices throughout the year to make sure she had the funds it special, but why would you or anyone else make those sacrifices? It's not your day, it's not your event, you aren't part of it, you're just a witness to it. It doesn't matter to you if you are there or not, if your attendance is important to her to help make her day special to her, then she should budget for it.

I can see LassyLass's POV as I thought you had already paid for your holiday next year, having saved up a year for it, so thought that seeing as you had already done that you could do it again for your sister's wedding. However, it appears you are paying it off this year.

However, I wouldn't write it completely off...you can get some amazing last minute deals/easter deals etc - if you went for 2/3 nights you wouldn't need hold luggage - take a small wheely suitcase to hold nice clothes and wear the same thing for travelling, borrow toilletries etc., your gift is you going and you don't need new clothes (that is a luxury that isn't necessary - new clothes and wedding's is a silly thing to buy into), look into motels etc., see if you can set aside enough to cover about half of what people are putting about (500 pounds or so) by easter next year and then see if you can get anywhere with that? Or ask your sister to double what you can afford to pay?

Ultimately, you know your finances best so if you truly can't afford it then that is that, but if there is anyway you could put aside that extra and head over to italy for a long weekend, think of it as being a particularly special summer :)

For what it is worth, hostels are very good with families nowadays, getting a private room can be very very very cheap! Obviously, depends on location but during my travels this year more often than not , the private rooms are taken by families who cannot afford hotel/motel esque places

I thought the whole thing about going abroad was to do it on the quiet with no fuss. If you want the fuss then get married in the UK when most if not all of the invited people can attend. And it can be done cheaply if you look in the right places.

My cousin gets married abroad (in Cuba I think) next year dispite the fact her brother, his DP, and their 3DC's can't afford it nor can my uncle so most of her immediate family won't be there - she has accepted this and continued with her plans. (even though she is pregnant and due to give birth 6-8 weeks before her wedding day).

Lassy
That is quite a bizarre post.

The cheapest flights at present are around £30 per person per route.

So for 4 people, that makes £30 x 2 = 60 x 4 = £240

And that is without luggage, or credit card booking fee.

Say £300 - 400 for the flights.

How do you expect them to get there and back in one day? Add £100 for one night, or more realistically, £200 for two nights.

That is £500 - 600 MINIMUM.

Add on costs of travel to venue.

I think Lassy is the OP's sister

I think you're right Pizza

surely the point is not whether someone CAN save that amount of money but whether they SHOULD spend all that hard earned cash on going off on a jolly to another country they have no interest in going to just because someone else says so....
It's exactly what I said to dp family when they all said we could well afford to go to his cousins wedding abroad as we had been saving for ages to buy a house...completely missing the point that we'd missed nights out, holidays etc to save for our future & our child and that every penny counts when you're doing that, you don't do that for fun or to piss months and months of savings up the wall for a bridezillas "special day"

Yanbu

I could save £1k by next summer.

No way would I spend it on attending someone elses wedding.

"surely the point is not whether someone CAN save that amount of money but whether they SHOULD spend all that hard earned cash on going off on a jolly to another country they have no interest in going to just because someone else says so...."

Totally agree. It's a bride and groom earmarking a family's money that I find so offensive.

Another here here to happylittlebear & Nesta.

Lassylass is failing to acknowledge that people may be able to afford it, having sacrificed other things, but why in the hell should they? And the argument "well if you don't like it don't go" is puerile too, since close relatives would really really love to be in attendance of a loved ones' wedding, and feel rightly aggrieved that they are being put in this difficult position. I would only ever have a wedding abroad if I could make the cost of attendance comparable for the guests as it would be were we do have a UK bash, or if it was just going to be me and DH-to-be.

I'm not being funny but does your Sis actually WANT people there? I ask this as we booked our wedding abroad knowing for a fact our family/friends couldn't or wouldn't pay to go meaning we got to do it our way with just us there. This might sounds strange to some people but we have a very dysfunctional fake family . Just wondering if she has deliberately booked it this way in the hope people won't go?

friends and family members should only go abroad for holidays and on equal terms i.e. 'hi X, me and dh are thinking of going to a European city for 5 days, would you like to join us, which city do you like?'. Not ' i have decided that we are all going to Rome in May and i don't care if you need to eat baked beans for a year, and i will sulk if you don't come'.

"Lassylass is failing to acknowledge that people may be able to afford it, having sacrificed other things, but why in the hell should they? "

On the contrary - I am completely agreeing with this. And taking it one step further and saying that the 'I cant afford it' excuse is a lot of old rubbish that the bride and groom easily see through.

OPs real gripe here is that the whole thing is a pain in the behind and a UK wedding would have been easier for her. I agree. But its not her wedding.

Zeus - good post.

lassylass why do you persist in saying that everyone can afford to save £1000? You do know there is a recession, and many people simply aren't able to save any money ,let alone £1000. Have you heard of simple financial terms such as 'minimum wage', 'redundancy', 'reposession' ,'poverty' etc etc.

If someone says to me 'I can't afford it' then I just accept that at face value. I don't assume that I know their financial situation better than they do, and that they are making 'a lot of old rubbish' excuses, as you put it.
Similarily if someone said to me 'sorry, I have no one to look after my children' I would just accept that as the truth as well. I wouldn't think 'they have really. they're just making rubbish excuses'.

We got married abroad to avoid a big wedding. We invited 50 people (the bare minimum of expentant invitees) 6 months before, expecting maybe 5 to be able to make it. The only ones who didn't come were DH's parents and my ex boyf (think he was being gracious but as part of my small tight nit uni crowd it would have been rude not to invite him).

We had an absolute blast, for a week, with people coming in for between 2 nights and all 7. It wasn't expected at all though and we threw several meals and parties into the mix to say thanks. It was so much fun and friends still talk about it being the best wedding.

It's your sister. I would go, even if it's just you. Is there anyone else you could share accom with?