To want a small / cheap wedding?

[Tiba]

Got engaged 7 months ago, we now have a small baby.

I don't want a big wedding for the following reasons -

1 - I was married before and guests of around 50 was more than enough

2 - I'v lost a lot of confidence since giving birth and don't like the idea of being centre of attention (shallow reasons )

3 - we don't have the money for a traditional wedding. If we save up it will be years before we can do it (4-5 years by my guess)

However - he hasn't been married before.
He has a huge family and wants them all to be there. Family only would mean guests of around 75-80.
He is a perfectionist and wants to have the 'perfect' day which his Ida's of a perfect day involve plenty of decent food, drink and a lovely venue.
He compares every affordable option with his experience of weddings he's been to before and sees what I suggest as inferior and that people won't enjoy it as much.

The more I look at the amount weddings cost the more I just want it to be just the two of us in a registry office and just a few witnesses.

Am I being unreasonable to want a no nonsense wedding and if so is there a half way meeting point?
I really don't want to spend more than £5k at the most

Two things occurred to me from your post.

Firstly, the size of his family. You need to aim to accommodate all of the same degree of kinship, so you cannot have all your family but only a proportion of his if he is just as close to all his cousins as you are to yours. So you may need to compromise on the size - increasing a bit, but asking him to see if his wilder fringes can be pruned a little.

Secondly, you can still have a lovely party with good food and at least some of the booze (nice to provide the toast, and perhaps more, but no-one is likely to mind if you supplement with cash bar assuming it's at normal-ish prices)

what are the exact elements he wants?

Would he consider an elopement, followed by a big party?

Oh, and has he actually put any (costed) ideas forward?

It's a bit shit if all he does is criticise yours. It's nit up to you to keep serving up options until he deigns to agree to one. Tell him to get his arse in gear and start contributing.

Village hall? There are some really lovely ones around, cost approx a few hundred for Friday - Sunday hire, leaving you about 4.5k to spend on everything else.

Hi op.

My ds got married at the tiny church down our lane. Back to ours for afternoon tea and champers in our garden for just immediate family so 20 people.

Vicar came and said best wedding he's ever been to cost around £300.

Omg 5K!!! Insane totally insane.

£5k is a good budget for a DIY wedding. I did a catered party for PIL in my home for £1400 including decorations and food for 60. If you were careful by hiring a nice hall, getting second hand decorations and a very nice cold buffet it could be lovely. We spent £2000 ish on wine and beer for our wedding for 80 guests and there was LOADS left. You could even hire a cash bar if that was more economical.

It's his wedding too, so you need to compromise. That means lots of talking to come to a solution.

I can't get over anyone spending 5K on a wedding.

Honestly less is more and it's about your commitment and love not feeding dozens of relatives.

Still each to own

How would you feel about going abroad to do it?

I've just been to a friend's wedding in Rome and it was beautiful, but cost her significantly less than a big traditional wedding and of course absolutely justified in only inviting immediate family and close friends.

We all stayed in the same hotel (paid for ourselves), walked to a stunning church and then eating/drinking in a restaurant into the early hours (bride and groom paid).

I had a small wedding through choice, but I would have been devastated if DH (who has been married before) had said that he wanted a small wedding because it was his second. It would have made me feel less important and special. It's already a tricky thing to marry someone who's been married before and that would have made it much harder.

Tbh I'm sure DH DID want a small wedding partly because he'd been married before (his last one was a GIGANTIC lavish two-day affair that left him in debt for years) but he didn't ever say that to me!

You need to compromise, but you need to be sensitive when explaining your reasoning for not wanting anything big.

I would ask your OH to cost out what he wants, and explain how you are going to afford it. When he, presumably, realises that you will have to save for a number of years to achieve what he wants, he might change his mind.

Yanbu OP but it sounds like it is important to him to have his friends and family there. The village hall is a lovely idea. You could have a small registry office ceremony with immediate family and close friends and then make the rest of the day quite informal. This way you could include all of the family and friends he wants but avoid being 'on show', i.e., not to cutting the cake, sitting at a top table etc.

To the PPs who are amazed at spending £5k on a on wedding I thought this is quite a small budget surely?! We planned a budget of around £8k and spent well over double, that was with much of it being DIY.

Yanbu in wanting a small wedding but neither is he in wanting a bigger wedding. How would you feel in his shoes if he'd been married before and said he wouldn't have a big wedding because he'd done it all before?

When you say family would be 80 people what do you class as family? Is that parents, siblings, grandparents, nieces/nephews, aunts/uncles or does it include cousins, cousins children, great aunts/uncles?

You could do what friends of ours did, she'd been married before but he hadn't, they didn't have loads to spend and compromised on the size of the wedding. They got married in the registry office with close family (maximum allowed was 30) and then hired a pub function room for the reception and invited wider family and friends to the pub. They had a dj, wedding cake, decorated the tables and had afternoon and evening buffets and a cash bar (every wedding I've been to has had a cash bar). It cost them less than 2000 all in and was great.

You both need to compromise and find a middle ground which is easier said than done.

We had a small wedding, midweek registry office with two witnesses and our dc's which cost us about £50 for the ceremony and then the extra charges that you have to pay. Then we had a reception on the saturday night with dj and band and buffet and about 200 guests. We already had 4dcs, had been together a decade and DH had been married twice before, he said I could have a big wedding if I wanted one but I didn't want to save for years to afford one and I begrudge spending that amount of money on one day.
I have been to bigger weddings which have been lovely but I wouldn't change mine in hindsight.
I think you need to decide which parts are important to each of you and find a happy medium.

Thank you. Many points I hadn't considered.

Family size wise - mine is tiny. I could quite happily get away with just parents and 3 siblings, so only 5 in total.
I don't have grandparents or aunties / uncles.

He on the other hand would like parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews.

He has seen his brother get married and they had a big wedding and he wants to make sure the same people can come to his.

It is invinsiderate for me to say that I want a smaller wedding because I was married before. I haven't said that to him specifically.

£5k to me is too much still, but it's the amount I could happily spend without it seeming like a total waste and thinking it could have been better spent on the house or elsewhere.
However, even the cheapest wedding I cost up roughly comes to anywhere between £11k - £15k.

My parents have offered their garden to us, but once you factor in the hire of the marquee, floor, hairs, tables, crockery, cutlery, portaloos it's already £5k before you think about feeding people.
They are also a good 45 minutes drive from the nearest registry office, so not too convenient.
It would have been lovely though and if we had the money to spend I would love to have done that.

Ps - I don't want to end up in debt for years and I don't want to postpone getting married for wars to save up for what is effectively a party.
I would rather do the marriage bit, have a lovely meal and a bit of a dance at a lovely restaurant with our nearest and dearest and then have a fabulous honeymoon.

Come back home without debt and with lovely memories.

Also, having done it before hand, the planning part stressed me out immensely and that's something I am not looking forward to at all.
He will share the job and we'll do it together but he doesn't have a lot of free time and I'm on maternity leave at the moment so able to start gathering some ideas.

@Tiba We got the use of a pub for a minimum spend of £250 behind the bar and then got in outside caterers (who were amazing) who fed 175 people for under £2.5k (in London). Got family to bake as wedding gifts for a cake table (traditional in my family). Decorated it ourselves with lots of eBay bargains - I think I spent about £200 in total. So we still had everyone we wanted to be there and managed to do it for fairly cheaply.

It's possible to have a cheaper wedding that's still everything you want it to be.

We spent about £2500 on our wedding. We got married in the registry office (which was actually really fancy! Beautiful building) and then hired a hall for the evening, with a local band and a buffet. We decorated it ourselves, and gave all our guests a "free drink of your choice" voucher to hand in at the bar, so the first drink was on us, and everyone paid for their own drinks after that.
We saved money by having a family member make the cake as our wedding present, and I wore a long white evening dress rather than a "wedding dress" so it cost a lot less but still looked lovely.