Love on a Shoestring: Our $150 Wedding

[Cheebs]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18628580/site/newsweek/

May 21, 2007 issue - You might call me a minimalist, or just plain cheap, but when I set out to plan my recent wedding I didn't want anything elaborate. My husband-to-be, Richard, agreed, although he did harbor a wish for a Vegas drive-through wedding with an Elvis impersonator as our witness.

We both love nature and simplicity, so we could have driven 65 miles south to Colorado and married, just the two of us, in the mountains, with a license that said parties to the marriage in the space provided for the wedding officiant. No minister, no witnesses necessary. If we'd done that, we could have had a $50 wedding. But we wanted, as Richard said, "someone there to say a few inspiring words." So we decided to splurge.

Splurging, of course, is relative. The average U.S. wedding now costs more than $27,000. Granted, I have been out of school for a while, but $27,000 is more than I spent on my entire college education, including two graduate degrees.

How has a nearly $30,000 price tag become acceptable for a one-day event? It seems to me the money could be far better spent for a down payment on a house, a few years' tuition at a state university or a spiffy new hybrid with some left over for gas.

To place it in a larger context, what might $30,000 mean to a school or medical clinic on the Wind River Indian Reservation or in the Mississippi Delta? What would it mean to a family living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans?

Multiplying the average wedding's cost by the nearly 2.3 million weddings estimated to occur in the United States this year means that Americans will spend about $64 billion on weddings. Compare this figure with the gross domestic product of Lithuania ($49 billion), Nepal ($40 billion), Luxembourg ($31 billion) or Iceland ($11 billion).

In the late '70s I lived in Appalachia, where I learned of an old custom. Guests used to bring thin layers of molasses cake to a wedding. The bride's mother or aunts stacked the layers upon one another, cementing them with apple butter or jam. You could tell how popular a couple was by the height of their "stack cake." When I lived there the stack-cake custom had gone the way of the local version of a shivaree, when neighbors would collect the bride and groom on their wedding night and run them down the railroad tracks in a wheelbarrow. But the uncomplicated Appalachian weddings I witnessed—simple ceremonies in a country church with cake and mints in the basement after—are just as memorable to me as splashier weddings I've attended since then.

We know other couples who, like us, have married out of the mainstream. One couple married on horseback in the backcountry near Grand Teton National Park, one by a mountain lake near Laramie. Another had a quick living-room wedding after Christmas to accommodate visiting relatives. The rise of "Internet ministers" has made this type of wedding more common. Three acquaintances of ours have availed themselves of an online ordination process that authorizes them to perform legal marriages.

While nearly $30,000 may buy more glitz, it can't buy more joy or romance. Our own wedding in the woods was intimate, dreamy and definitely one-of-a-kind. We snow shoed a short distance into the trees and found a pine alcove for our chapel. Our Unitarian-Universalist minister read some inspirational passages we had chosen, we exchanged our own vows and we kissed. Two friends photographed the ceremony with a digital camera and surprised us by popping open a bottle of champagne they'd carried into the woods in a backpack. Throughout the ceremony, light from the sun and clouds patterned through snow-laden trees. The usual Wyoming wind was absent.

Afterward we enjoyed a simple dinner at a cozy café, complete with wood stove, in Centennial, a town of 100 at the base of the Snowy Range. A few weeks later, we ordered a special cake from a bakery and e-mailed an open invitation to our friends for a potluck dinner, minus gifts. We have a marriage certificate and an online photo album to share with family and friends. The final rundown: Marriage license: $25. Dinner for five: $60. Minister's snowshoe rental: $15. Flowers: $25. Champagne: $10. Cake: $15. Online photo album: free. Total: $150.

[The Miles Trahan Burger Experiment]

GREAT THREAD, WOULD SKIP AGAIN.

[Cheebs]

GREAT THREAD, WOULD SKIP AGAIN.

fuck off this is A VERY USEFUL ARTICLE

[Vizzys]

CHUBKINS

[The Miles Trahan Burger Experiment]

SUP BABYBOO?

[Vizzys]

downloading the new zelda ds game

lol piracy

[Cheebs]

THIS IS NOT A SHAKE THREAD.

It's love ON A SHOESTRING BUDGET

[Vizzys]

I read the article and said whoa at expensive weddings.

[Fragamemnon]

I read the article and said whoa at expensive weddings.

Even a small and subdued, tasteful wedding can run well above 5K. Hell, my friend is getting married in a month and his photographer is costing him almost as much as my entire wedding two months ago.

A lot of the cost savings is the willingness to do stuff yourself, find someone who will do stuff for cheap, and, well, doing stuff yourself or leaving it out of the wedding completely.

$27K is insane, though. If the couples would even take half of that and put it towards the down payment on a place to live or to pay down high-interest debt, the marriage would start off on a lot sounder footing than a huge wedding would.

[BlackMage]

just go to vegas, god damn.

[Fresh Prince]

I blame the Princess Complex.

[BlueTsunami]

I blame the Princess Complex.

Bridezillas

If I ever get with a nice girl that seems like she won't be bitchy her whole life and turns into a Bridezilla? I'm totally putting on ma runnin shoes

[Mr. Gundam]

I think our wedding cost about $12,000, and it was far from over the top.

Totally fucking worth it. Our wedding day was probably the most fun I've ever had. But, my wife's parents had stocks they invested into a wedding fund back when she was little, so no one went into debt funding the shindig. Don't spend the cash on a lavish wedding if you can't afford it. Unfortunately, most American like to live outside their means.

[Fresh Prince]

Well my experience is that most parents pay (in part) for their children's weddings as long as you're willing to oblige them ie ceremony in church, food etc.

[Mr. Gundam]

Well my experience is that most parents pay (in part) for their children's weddings as long as you're willing to oblige them ie ceremony in church, food etc.

We got married at my wife's church in Omaha, NE, which was important to her. And we had the reception at the Omaha Press Club, which was free, aside from food and drinks, since my father-in-law is a member.

Our biggest costs were flowers, food and drinks (father-in-law demanded a top shelf open bar), my wife's dress and the photographer.

My wife and I paid for our honeymoon on our own. We ended up spending $4,000 on two weeks in Japan.