The two of us are located very far from both of our families, and our families are located very far from each other, so the traveling logistics of setting up a wedding would have been a nightmare. We kept it a day just for us two to share. We just hired a chaplain to marry us in an adorable little coffee shop, and then went out for a nice dinner together. My husband and I spent a few hundred bucks on our wedding. Why We Spent Almost Nothing on Our Wedding It’s important to step back and make sure the things we buy are truly making us happy, and that we’re not just buying things to keep up appearances or stay competitive with peers. It’s a status symbol.īut the same thing goes for the cars we drive, the houses we buy, and the clothes we wear. Like it’s a direct comparison about how successful you are, or how big your set of friends and family is. If someone sees a friend have a large wedding, it can feel inadequate to have a small wedding. Just because I’d rather stash more cash into my thrift savings plan or Roth IRA than spend on big things doesn’t mean everyone else has to.Īccording to Student Loan Hero’s survey, 47% of couples felt pressured to have a big costly wedding, either by family, friends, or society:Īnd 74% of respondents in that survey said they are going into debt to fund their upcoming wedding, with a whopping 61% of them saying they went into credit card debt for it.
#LYN ALDEN GENDER HOW TO#
After all, who I am I to tell anyone else how to spend their money? If people’s reasons for spending so much on weddings were purely for happiness, there’d be less to comment on. Regardless of which source is the most accurate, it’s all still rather high, considering that the median amount that families aged 35-54 have saved for retirement is only about $60,000. A third survey by Student Loan Hero placed the median at about $20,000. The types of people that would fill out surveys like this, and that visit wedding websites the most, are likely people more interested than average in elaborate weddings.īased on another survey of over 10,000 participants in 2017 by, the average wedding was $25,764, and the median was a slightly tamer $15,000 or so. But geography plays a huge role too – the average wedding price ranges from $18k in Utah to almost $77k in Manhattan.Īs a caveat, I think the sampling bias of surveys like this is a bit skewed. Even all those paper invitations people send out total $408 on average.
Then there’s the music, the ceremony, the florist, the cake, the photography, the dress, the multitude of other things, and all of it adds up to over $33k. The second or third biggest is the engagement ring, at $5.7k on average.Ĭatering is another huge expense at $70/person, which depending on the size of the wedding is one of the biggest expenses. The biggest expense by far is the venue, accounting for almost half the total price tag. This number includes the engagement ring, but excludes the honeymoon.
They do these surveys each year with similar results, making the sample size over time pretty huge. Wedding Cost BreakdownĪccording to a survey of about 13,000 participants by The Knot, the average wedding in 2017 cost $33,391. This article takes a look at where all the money goes for weddings, why people spend so much, how to spend less, and why we decided to skip it all. Now, admittedly, that’s a bit extreme too, but even looking back on it 7 months later, I couldn’t be happier with our choice! If that’s not a personal finance minefield, I don’t know what is.īut even scarier, the reasons that many people spend that much are concerning, particularly in the way they finance it.ĭespite earning a considerably higher income ourselves than the average household (and having hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away before our 30’s) my husband and I married in early 2018 for about $800, with most of the cost being the wedding bands. The average cost of a wedding in the United States was somewhere between $25,000 and $33,000 in 2017, depending on which source you believe.