Do you think weddings have become ridiculously expensive?

[Coloutwed]

I've been thinking about how much weddings seem to cost these days🙄. Do you think it's possible to have a lovely wedding without spending a fortune, or does everything just add up no matter what you do? I'd love to hear how people approached their own weddings and what they felt was actually worth spending money on.🤗

£62 at the registry office seems like fair value considering it will save us £100,000’s in IHT from April when pensions are caught.

We’ve not told anyone we’re getting married and likely won’t mention it after the event either.

We wouldn’t want a big wedding if it was free.

Nope. Registry office licence costs are really very reasonable. What else do you need ?

My first wedding (still on a budget) cost £3.5k all in, in 2005.

About to remarry and even the exact same thing costs nearly 3x as much. I want a bigger do than my first wedding, dfiance wants a smaller one than his, so we're doing a LOT of head-scratching. It's INSANE that pretty much every wedding we've been to must have cost 10s of thousands of pounds, when younger couples could use that money to properly set themselves up rather than pay for instagram-worthy parties to impress their mates.

I think it's more that people want big lavish party weddings. It's perfectly possible to have a nice personal and much cheaper wedding.
You could get married in a church, registry office or cheap venue and have a reception in a church hall, room in a pub or somewhere else, and have a buffet, you can even ask guests to provide dishes for the buffet instead of giving wedding presents.
Or you could have a very small wedding followed by a meal in a nice restaurant for close family.
It's not necessary to spend a fortune.

I had a civil partnership (once they became legal for heterosexual couples) in 2022. It was purely for legal reasons. We didn’t even have to speak, just signed the document. It was very cheap too!

Nope weddings are what you make of them. I got married in 2018 the wedding cost 6k in all we had quite a posh venue sit down dinner for 75. My dress was off the rack cost £150. Bridesmades dresses from EBay. Groomsman suits from the sale in M&S. I knew someone who spend £30k on their wedding which I thought was outrageous. And obviously you can go even cheaper with a registry office

I think social expectations are driving much of it. I'm in the US. When I was a child in a medium size town in the deep South, many weddings were held in church on a Sunday afternoon around 3 p.m. The reception would be in the church social hall, and sometimes would only consist of punch and wedding cake. People who wanted to push the boat out a bit might have fancy tea sandwiches, often made by the ladies of the church. The reception would last about two hours at the most, and then everyone went home after seeing the bride and groom off. Brides or their mothers often made the wedding dress and the bridesmaids' dresses, back when home sewing was less expensive than buying retail.

That kind of wedding has completely disappeared in the present day, and people expect to be fed and to be provided alcohol. The social pressure, much of it driven by social media, fuels the expectation that a wedding should be a much more lavish event than it was in days of yore.

my wedding will cost £15k next year, 23 people, we are DIYing the food

Best wedding I ever went to was in a church hall (free as the couple were church members). All guests to bring a dish and drink, no alcohol. The church band formed the band for the dancing.

To me that's mad - that's £650 per person plus food.

That's the same as a week's European holiday PER PERSON for each of your guests!?!

Or how many months worth of mortgage payments?

Maybe I'm just tight....

Mine cost about £750.

I am persuading my DC to elope. No way am I contributing to spaffing money away on a party.

It’s what we did, though we did splurge on a fabulous lunch afterwards with our two witnesses!

@Beenaroundabit i agree it's mad but to me i never get to see most of the people there. 1 person lives near me and the second closes is 11h drive away. So having all my favourite people in one place we want to have a party so were doing two and a half days

Best wedding I’ve been to was the upstairs room of a local pub. Sandwiches & pork pies. Karaoke, a right old knees up. All of the others were very expensive hotel food in a function room. The ceremony was the best bit.

22 years ago, $50 Orlando Court House, no need for witnesses or blood tests. Did it whilst on a last minute holiday. No debt, no grief, no relative stress. I had seen too many spend ridiculous amounts and divorce, often with money at the core of disagreements. I'm not tight, just don't enjoy wedding productions or the silly costs involved.

I think alot of people these days have expectations of weddings but corners can be cut to save money. Our biggest costs were venue, photographer and flowers which I was not prepared to compromise on but we didn't bother with favours or entertainment. Most guests were happy to just socialise, so entertainment was not needed. My stepdad did the music on his laptop so we didn't have to pay for a dj or band. There are ways of doing it on a shoestring but decide what is important to you and what's not required.

We had a reasonably big (but not massive) wedding over 10 years ago now. We could have flown around the world for what it cost, but I honestly wouldn’t change a thing. It was the only day in my entire life when we’ve had all our favourite people in the same room and we were able to give them a bloody good day out! It was honestly one of the best days of my life and I’d do it again if I could. Some people that attended are now no longer with us and I’m so pleased we got that one day with everyone dressed up and having a great time. It’s not for everyone but life would be boring if we were all the same

My dd married her girlfriend a few weeks ago. Reg office, outfits from vinted, room in a pub, cake from M&S, rings approx £250. The only thing they have paid a significant amount on was a pro photographer because they wanted nice photos. It was a lovely lovely day, came in under £1500

I wonder if the difference is now that so much of wedding planning appears to be designed for photos/social media.

So the bridesmaids really don’t need matching dressing gowns to get ready in, and brides don’t need two different dresses, chairs don’t really need fancy covers, the entire day doesn't need photographed etc etc

The nicest weddings I’ve been to have been simple and straightforward.

My friends are getting married next year and their register office is costing £800! So it's not always cheap. It's for the biggest room, there are 3 or 4, but still only seats 40 ish people I think.

So yes, weddings are crazy expensive!

I’m getting married next year for the third time. Well, the fourth if you count the little church blessing my second husband and I had that was literally just the two of us.

Im on a lot of wedding reddits etc and the budgets are, er, refreshing.

If you want to host a big party, and tbh I think that’s a completely reasonable desire to have, then it’s going to cost a lot of money.

I have really enjoyed bring and share weddings many times, which imo is one of the only ways to have a big party and keep the cost down, and did consider doing that this time. But I decided against because frankly we are pretty comfortable these days and it felt wrong to have that kind of reception in those circumstances.

We are getting married at the local parish church and having a reception in our garden at home, which obviously we can only do because we have a garden of some size (not as big as it sounds though, tbh I am crossing my fingers that not everyone will come). So I’m not booking Highclere Castle. We’re having a ceremony and a canapes reception, no evening do or dancing, so again it’s the kind of thing that people suggest in order to keep the cost low. I’m not having any bridesmaids and a friend is making the cake. But by the time I have set everything up for a party of 150 people, it’s still going to cost about £25k, without the honeymoon, the hen do or our outfits. (I’m paying for the hen do outright myself).

Inflation exists. Wages are up, materials are up, costs are up. It’s time to stop throwing hands up in horror that things you did yourself 20 years ago cost a lot more now. It IS still very possible to have an inexpensive wedding but you need to have a tiny number of people for that. EVEN a bring and share reception at a village hall is going to run into several thousand if you have a lot of people.

We’re getting married this weekend on a cruise. Us and all our kids are coming and the whole thing (more than a week holiday plus the legal wedding) and the whole lot has cost us 9k. The wedding itself was about 3k including all photos, cake, flowers, legal marriage license etc. and could have been less if we didn’t want any guests.

We considered the registry office route but actually once we’d paid for a photographer, flowers etc. plus the registry office fee we would have been over 1.5k at least even doing it that way.

•our registry office is £500 for up to 10 guests, £650 if we’re over 10 which we would be just with our closest family member

•photographer the absolute cheapest is £250 but average is more like £600

• add in flowers for bride, bridesmaids etc. and a cake and you would be well on your way to 1.5k and that’s with no meal afterwards or the dress/suits.

So yes, if you want a quick wedding with just you two you can do it for £80 but if you have guests and want photos then it quickly adds up even at the registry office.

Agreed. We’re planning on getting married next year and some of the costs are insane. We’ve seen £25k for a wedding venue alone!! As soon as you mention wedding there is instantly a premium. Food for £100 per person with nothing fancy. Even buffets are £30 per person and that’s for a few nibbles. So if anyone does know of anywhere lovely in East Sussex that doesn’t cost the earth then please let me know!

Weddings don't need to cost a fortune. It was a long time ago now, but our wedding cost £200 in total. That included the register office license, a modest one tier cake, a posy for me and a couple of carnations for my husband and best man, my dress, which I got from a local Indian shop, £100 for wine and soft drinks, and £50 for the buffet, which our mothers prepared for us. our local pub let us use their function room as a wedding present, and a friend drove us to the register office in his white cadillac. My husband and I prepared cassette tapes of our favourite heavy metal tracks, and a friend was in charge of the sound system. We had about 50 guests, and there was plenty of food and drink for everyone. It was by far the best wedding I've ever been to. in contrast, some friends got married a couple of weeks before us, and spent £5,000 on their wedding, which was quite a lot at that time.

My first wedding was £19 pounds in total, getting married next year - it will be about 20k.