....in thinking the cost of weddings is becoming beyond todays young people

[concernedrose]

DS is planning on getting married next year. He and fiance both have good jobs but are paying off student loans, and pay £850 a month in rent for a tiny one bedroomed flat. They also are trying to save for a mortgage. So imagine their (and our) horror at the price of weddings. It seems that to be able to do everything for under £10,000 is virtually impossible in the area we live in. And they have accepted they wont be able to have a honeymoon immediatly after the wedding. This seems a vast sum of money to me, but even calling in favours from friends and relatives, (ie cake making, invitation making, flower arranging) it looks like this is what it is going to cost. Oh well, anyone for beans on toast!!!

I know a couple who have been engaged for twelve years...they're coming up for thirty now.....and they won't get married because they can't afford it. It's bull...what they can't afford is the big fat gypsy wedding that she'd love. They obviously don't actually value the institution of marriage or they'd have gotten the priest to wed them years ago

I couldn't agree more bluer. I think some couples overlook the reality of marriage, all for the sake of a big flashy cost-a-lot wedding which is only one day of their lives.

Having said that I still think a wedding day should be special. It needn't cost the earth though.

DH and i got married last Sat. We had it in central London. £490 for the registry office (westminster). £220 for my dress. £50 new shirt and tie for DH. £400 for a hotel for 3 nights (2 day honeymoon in London!) £1000 on food and drink in a pub nearby. £45 bouquet. £80 2 gorgeous gateauxs (sp?) which was dessert and the 'wedding cake'. £500 on rings. £50 on cds which we put on our ipod and plugged into the pubs av. 40 guests, free drink all night, plenty to eat, we all had a fab time.

I'm getting married in Surrey later this year and there definitely are cheaper venues around. As others have said, hotels tend to be pricey! Village halls, wedding barns, pubs, school halls, e.t.c...are all a great alternative to a hotel and you usually have a bit more flexibility than in a hotel and can personalise it far more than you could have otherwise.

There is a nice registry office in Surrey as well (the other two I wasn't so keen on though). They have been very flexible with us. We plan on having music on the way in, my brother reading a speech, a family friend singing during the signing, so every bit as personalised really as we would have got in a hotel with the added bonus that we get to have our reception we were want rather than being pressured into having it at a hotel because we want to have the ceremony there! Oh and it's £240 instead of nearer £650! It would have been cheaper if we'd gone for a weekday too.

My church is costing £580, including bell ringers and organist, as well as all the legal certificate stuff.

We are getting married at 11, another couple is booked at 1, so we've met the other couple and are just having their flowers for free they're setting up the night before.

I have to say I sit right in the middle of this. I DO think a wedding should be personal, about the couple etc. BUT I also believe that for us some people it is a rare opportunity to just have a good party, celebrate that sometimes life isn't a big pile of crap. Have a good time with friends and family and celebrate something that's a bit bloody marvellous.

Babies, jobs, old age all come in the way of being able to do that, so whilst we can, why not just have a good party.

We're hiring our village hall for £6 an hour. Got fish and chip and ice cream vans for £7.50 a head. BYOB and cheap buffet food for the evening. Hiring a PA for £40 and having a right good party in the evening. Daytime has loads of village fete games - apple bobbing, splat a rat, coconut shy, giant jenga. Evening we have a side room we're sticking comfy chairs for people who need a rest and poker/roulette in.

I won't be made to feel guilty that I'm not popping into a registry office on my Tuesday lunch break. I live in a little village and am very active in the church and community. Our friends and family live hundreds of miles away and we barely get to see most of them, not since having DS (15mo). So I bloody well will let loose and just have a party for the sake of it.

I got married last year at a registry office, no honeymoon, I wore a cocktail dress, only invited 10 guests to wedding and party afterwards (meal in a restaurant).. came in at well under £1000 but extended family/friends were a bit miffed they weren't invited, I didn't want to spend loads but did want to get married. Part of me thinks its a shame we couldn't have had a bigger one, but the other half of me had the best day ever and probably would've had found the usual type of wedding quite stressful.

You can easily get married for under £10k. Why spend so much to make something MORE like everyone else's?

I reckon the amount spent on a wedding has an inverse correlation to the length & happiness of the marriage. Not strictly scientific that but you get the drift.

If they can't manage a wedding on what they can afford, they are perhaps not mature enough to be making lifelong commitments.

We have a spreadsheet with budget, for 100 guests (everyone is invited to the whole day) it's looking at 4k. I have booked/paid for my dress, underwear, veil, shoes, grooms suit, venue hire, church, bridesmaids dresses (£20 reduced from £50 in the January sales), cake, day and evening food and drink.

The only thing we're not yet sure of is flowers and decorations - we've made a rough guess at that. But my theme is edwardian village fete/garden party, so I'm only having a very small posy of forget me nots as a bouquet, I'm having fresh flowers as a tiara because I've always wanted that, bridesmaids wearing flower head circlets. Button hole for groom and best (wo)man - as his best man is a girl.

I say cake - my MoH is making the cake, and cupcakes. Best (wo)man is making the bunting, table cloths and some other decoration.

I agree Meryl. Purely anecdotally - i went to 2 weddings which were way over the top (one was £25k and the cake was 7st!!) and both were divorced within a year. My 1st wedding was about 8k and we were divorced within 2! My recent wedding was about 3k and i'm hoping i get at least 15 good years out of it

How many years would 5k get me? Am hoping at least 5 - we're buying our first house right now, and I want to make sure I get enough of DPs assets in the divorce ;)

I should say first, I loathe and detest weddings, people overstuffed into airless rooms, bored bored bored, just like every other one you have ever been to, and 8 times out of 10 some poor woman who's life has peaked at that point.

But even if I was the biggest possible fan of them, I wouldn't be able to understand what those of logic would let people who don't yet have a secure home spend a small fortune on a PARTY. Because at the end of the day, that's all it is.

Im a massive fan of marraige, but it can be done for £200!

Scheherazade. £5k and under, AND you can afford it, AND you're clearly level headed. Ergo, for keeps.

I reckon the amount spent on a wedding has an inverse correlation to the length & happiness of the marriage.

Only if the money spent exceeds the money available to the couple without getting themselves into debt. I don't really like identikit £10,000 weddings but I also don't like the Smuggie McSmuggingtons who proudly annouce that their wedding cost £3.50, and the guests shared one cup of tea and a bag of frazzles between them.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to throw a big, fun, flash party if you can afford it.

YABU. £10,000?! Price of license, possibly chuch hire, rings from a pawn shop or QVC, perhaps a new frock and/or suit, dinner afterwards for family. Job done.

Squoosh I don't mean anyone to my comment entirely seriously, though there is some empirical evidence of it's truth amongst my friends.

The third sentence of my post though, definitely in dead earnest.

I agree, who wants to start married life owing thousands. Nope.

As I said before the planning of a wedding seems exhausting, I'll wait till I've reached J-Lo levels of wealth and divadom and have a servant arrange it all for me.

tbf we intended to use our money on a house, but since moving into this little rural village, getting heavily involved in community and church (am good friends with the vicar and the curate's family), plus the offer of £6 per hour for the hall, then getting a large back payment, we decided to just go for it! We're also buying a house at the same time. The vicar has offered us a house belonging to the church to rent in the meantime if we want it, for over £100pm less than the previous tenants.

We've managed to have the wedding we want, affordably. My dress is a one off design sample - they only made one as far as I am aware and it was less than half the price had it gone into production. And it's v.different and I love it :)

"choolgovernor, you can't get a job at 17 now, at least, not a paid one. You have to get into debt to the ponzi scheme that is now "education". Also you can't buy a house without at least 20% deposit, which is over 32k on average.

Looking up what a 17 year old might be earning in this day and age I found:

"The minimum wage for a 17 year old is £3.57. You will generally be lucky to get much more then that because at 17 you will not have the qualifications or experience for most of the better paid jobs."

That's about £7.7k per year. So on saving a third, even "religiously", this would mean about 13 years. Of course by then the houses will be even more expensive.
the 17 year old will be 30 and starting to worry about all those hysterical (pun intended) Daily Mail articles about declining fertility after 30...

When will old farts realise they are not better than young people, just lucked out when Thatcher sold off the council houses for peanuts?

(disclaimer: I am an old fart and regularly tut at genuinely sloppy or lazy behaviour by people of all ages and reserve the right to do so) "

Problem with those calculations is that they might start off on minimum wage for a 17 year old, but it will increase. Even agency cleaners can earn double that. Given the number of parents on here who think it's unreasonable to charge a realistic rate to youngsters living at home then I'm sure some have even more opportunity to save than we old farts did. However, look around at lifestyles, the majority patently don't save at anything like the rate they could.

To buy a council house for peanuts you had to first be living in it. Personally, I wasn't...

Anyway, any young couple contemplating spending £10k or more on a wedding (as most of my friends' children seem to) obviously have no worries about raising deposits do they? If they did they wouldn't be so stupid to piss that sort of sum up the wall on a big dress and wedding favours surely...

I remember being flummoxed at being asked if I was sending save the date cards as well as invites. It was just another cost and seemed silly to me- we sent out invites in good time. I remember looking at the brides mags and realising it was just advertising and chucked it. It just seemed like hello with prices:)

For favours, my dh and I didn't want to but mil insisted as its traditional. So we bought a favours pack online( almonds, little bags and ribbons) to be made up and had it delivered to her. We forgot to give them out so did it next day.

Our wedding day and night was lovely, but it's the next day everyone loved as it was so relaxed. Massive family party with buffet tables and drinks , everyone from families, friends, kids everywhere:)

I love a wedding. It's a chance to see family and cement our connections. And have a laugh at auntie barby getting tiddly on a glass of bubbly and dancing with the youngest most handsome man there. She was 80 and insisted. " it might be my last chance young man"

My dm also enjoyed the smell of the herbal cigarettes some of the more Bohemian guest had on the terrace late at night:) so relaxing...

Bluer: You mean that Pavee style wedding as depicted on that TV show right? Can't imagine other traveller communities putting off their marriage for that long - not least because you are definitely not supposed to luve together before marriage. I do wonder if that show has somewhat contributed to a desire for bigger weddings among the gorgies .. ..even though it's still pretty unrepresentative of how most people in the traveller community get married.

Wow. Ten grand IS seen as a pretty restrained amount to spend on a wedding here (NE Scotland) but I believe Scottish weddings average spend always was higher than UK average. We spent just under 10k, (refuse to count cost of rings as they are for life, not just a day!) and don' t think either DH and I were princessy about it!

Yes we did go down the hotel route but it was a local 3 star and we tweaked the menu which made the per head cheaper but presenting the averAge Scot with a finger buffet at a wedding will likely end in tears as something has to soak up the booze!

We also wanted a good ceilidh/dance band and that' s not cheap but it helped make the night.Parents chipped in, we cut a few corners and paid the rest ourselves but we already had a house so we weren't setting ourselves up for crippling debt (or any in fact)

Our choice, not for everyone but it was amazing to have a big doo and have all our favourite people in one room.And you can' t beat a big Scottish wedding-they become the stuff of legend and you never tire of talking about the really good ones! I believe it is a definite cultural marker - I have to been to an (gasp) English wedding and was struck by themmore low key nature of it all!

Congrats Spuddy!

I had a fairly fancy wedding for about 5000 pounds. Had appetizers rather than a full meal, booked a lodge that was not usually used for weddings, bought a bunch of booze and just had a bartender friend serve it til it was gone.

It was fairly fantastic actually :)

My best friend got married in a courthouse when she was 21. They couldn't afford anything....she got a pretty but cheap dress and had a small number of guests over for some nibbles. She's still happily married ten years later.

Were weddings ever within reach of young people?
They have always traditionally been paid by the family.

And you can get affordable weddings.
Just set a budget and work towards that.
Many people have simple weddings and don't spend fortunes on the dress.

If you don't have the money, then, no, you can't have "everything".
That has always been the case.