How much did you spend on your wedding?

[oliveoil]

This may have been done before so sorry if repeating.

Friends are getting married soon and are spending £20K not including honeymoon.

I am gobsmacked, is this the norm now?

How on earth do you spend £20K?

about 7k (sept 01) including 2 week honeymoon in florida week in orlando week in naples near tampa. Dress in sale, silk flowers (bad hatfever)arrange by mum, cake m & S Abount £50 for 3 tiers. Sit down meal for 40 evening buffet and disco for 100. actutal day about 5k as held in hotel as refused to get married in a church as only been into a church at other peoples wedding in the last 10 years much to MIL disgust.

i think we did it quite cheaply as we arranged ours over 2 years so able to find the best deals. a freind got married at the same time paid 15k (and still) paying for thiers as they decided that they wanted to be married first out of all our freinds, but arranged it within 3 mths. She is also someone who equaits the more somrthing costs the better its is.

sorry hayfever not hatfever although quite posiible as wedding hats are not always the best

£12K in London 3.5 years ago, excluding honeymoon. I was ruthless about the budget and cut where I could. But I can see how it can easily be £20K and more. Wedding suppliers are a big rip-off industry. The number of times they told me this was my special day (implying I should just go to town and indulge my fantasies) made me want to tell them to stuff it.

The reception and drinks are the killer. Directly related to the number of guests. But I could also have done it much more cost effectively. It is just a question of what you want and are prepared to pay for - the church/town hall wedding v. the stately home. Buffet v. Formal sit down 3-course dinner. The debenhams gown v. Vera Wang. A gaggle of bridesmaids v. none. Designer cake/flowers v. something your aunt put together. The permutations are endless.

7k including rings. Got married in Las Vegas so was already on honeymoon . Plus I wanted a deposit for our house more than a big wedding.

the dress alone could cost 3K if you wanted it too!!
Then there's flowers, photographer, wedding brekfast, disco, paying for bridesmaids dresses, suit hire of groom, best man, father of the bride, those favour things (small bag of sugar almonds!), presents for bridesmaids, best man, mothers etc etc Also church can be £300 or thereabouts
Ours came to about 3k I think but we had small wedding, dress from Monsoon, regitry office (about £36)

We did our own sugared almond favours for under a tenner with sugared almonds from Scoop'n'Save and two yards of voile from a curtain shop
Charles and Camilla decided to get married the same day as us and I had visions of them all sitting around at Windsor Castle making wedding favours for their eight hundred guests.

Ours was only about 3K - same idea as Nbg. My friend who got married last year said it ended up costing more than 30K. I think all the little things do add up and she had the works including fireworks and her husband to be arrived in a helicopter. It was a lovely wedding. I think it's more fun to go to a wedding like that if you're a guest though.

Rings £160
Dress £60 for silk which MIL (who was a dressmaker) made up for me
Suit for DH £100?
Registry Office £30
'Reception' was pay your own way at a local restaurant (christmas set menu!), but we bought bottles of wine about £60 I think. We're actually having a 'proper' reception next August when it will be half way between our 20th real anniversary and 10th Wedding Anniversary.
No honeymoon because we were skint and I was heavily pg

It was lovely, and pretty much stress free.

Too much! (But not 20K) It is really difficult to keep to a budget. We had planned to do everything ourselves, but as the wedding day got closer we did start throwing money at things. (To be fair, we were both unintentionally working full time just before the wedding and DS was 18 months old. With DS in tow, we had a very hit and run approach to choosing things like flowers). I think one of the problems is that the sums of money involved are so big that you loose touch with how much things should cost - once you have spent £100's on a cake, it doesn't seem unreasonable to spend £80 on hair accessories. On the other hand, we did choose the things that we wanted to spend money on - great cake, photographers and flowers - and ditched anything that wasn't important to us - no matching napkins and no posh cars.

Blueshoes is right though - you don't have to spend £20K. I think most of the surveys are done by bridal magazines, and as they are funded by advertising, it isn't in their interests to talk about people who spend £2K. No, they want to make you think that your wedding will be illegal if you do not have hand painted smarties.

My friends spent well over £20k on their wedding, less than a year later they split up. Dh & I spent about £1k all in and are still together 10 years later.

LOL at hand painted Smarties.
Not just illegal, but less likely to succeed unless you spend a bomb....

However I confess I do adore attending the lavish ones so really should not snipe

We spent about 4k and just over 1k of that was on my dress (handmade one of a kind and gorgeous) I do actually regret spending even that amount and would never ever of been able to justify spending 20k on it unless money really was no object.

Mt brother spent over 20k on his including honeymoon, was seperated 7 months later and has now finally just divorced a terrible waste of money.

We spent 2500 five years ago.
reception for 130 people, 2 bridesmaid dresses made by aunt, wedding dress £800, dh's suit £250.

hired school hall for reception and hired caterers. hotel's charge a fortune for receptions and you don't always get as much choice on the menu as when you hire your own.

beautiful day in feb in the snow and it snows every year on our anniversary since

You do forget how many different things there are - my list keeps getting longer, as I think about it, but fairly sure it was less than £2k - dress about £400, bridesmaid dresses about £150, reception buffet for 100 odd people about £800 iirc, rings £100, hire of venue £100, special dispensation from the Arch Bishop of Canterbury £100 (quite like putting that one down!) flowers maybe about £150, cake about the same. I was able to get ready on site, so to speak, and dh got the bus, so no cars, had a paying bar in the evening, did the invites and service orders ourselves. we were however, extremely lucky in that the place where we got married was incredibly beautiful and generous/stupid depending on how you look at it. They used to do it on a non-profit basis hence the £8 head buffet, which was gorgeous. We made up for it a bit by having quite a posy 10th anniversary which cost more!

ooo forgot dh's suit. nothing great expect it was about 100-150.

not posy, posh, subtle but important difference!

also forgot disco and hairdresser. blimey there's a lot isn;t there. possibly pushes ours to £2500

went to Australia to get married so exchange rate comes in here. Had 50 guests.. including children. Dh's suit and my dress accessories were 400 pound.

The food and drink was about 200 pound.

Rings were 240 quid think from dim distant memory.

celebrant worked out about 70 quid. Brothers did the pics and video had it at my aunt's property. Mum bought the cake as a gift, aunty paid for bouquet, other aunt and uncle paid for the portaloos as a present....

Fabulous wedding overlooking valley and bush .....

had no attendants just witnesses, hair was done quite reasonably... even by Aus money standards it was fine. Think our flights to Australia probably cost more than our actual wedding.

£850, including honeymoon.

Was 17 years ago mind.

3k including honeymoon. I think I'd have happily spent 20k if we'd had that kind of money. It's all relative I suppose.

£2000 including a bar bill of close to a grand. We know a lot of heavy drinkers .

Fabulous venue, on a Sunday and hence cheaper. Buffet lunch. Open bar, bubbly and wine. My dress from Ghost, in the sales, Dh's first ever suit (at the age of 35!) from Paul Smith, also in the sales. Bridesmaid and Best man dressed themselves (in plunging orange neckline and leather trousers/goth getup respectivly) Fake flowers courtesy of Best Man's wife, photos a wedding present fro my SIL and an ex-boyfriend of mine . Dh and best man walked to venue and I took a bus. Burnt our own CDs and gave them to teenage son of a friend of mine to play DJ with.

It's still talked about nostalgically by those sober enough to remember it.