Planning a wedding

The only way I would pay anyone $6,000 is if they delivered the photos to my house . . . and then painted my house . . . and then installed new carpets . . . and then installed a new central heating and cooling unit to the house.


Value of a dollar. Does it mean anything? Even today?

 

We hired my favorite stringer. Probably a mistake, though.

 

Remember, if the location wants to slaughter the meal in the chapel, you can pay more and have them do it the day before. [/theofficejack]

But seriously, it's very possible to do a wedding way south of $20,000. But it's not going to be the same as a $20K wedding, won't look the same, smell the same, taste the same, etc. Doesn't mean it's not possible. My wife and I (her second marriage, my first) probably spent more on the honeymoon (five-day cruise in a big stateroom with balcony) than the actual wedding, which was really a small service for family and a party for friends after. We had a friend take pictures, found a reasonably prized person who did cakes out of her home (friends still rave about how cool the groom's cake was), got married in her mom's church (their priest was doing the wedding rather than ours) for free. Our big outlay was the party: mid-afternoon wedding, heavy hors d'oeuvre with an open bar, about 100 people.

If your bride-to-be wants the big wedding, though, you gotta pay the piper. There's nothing wrong with that (if you can swing it), but that wasn't our cup of tea.

 

Or register at Target, strictly for gift cards.

 

Don't hire a photographer that does ANYTHING less than hand you DVDs or CDs at the end of the day with everything he shot on them.

My brother paid 3 times what I did and still had to buy prints off the guy's website. We hired a guy who knocked it out of the park, met us at a coffee shop a month later and handed us a DVD when we handed him a check.

 

Up in Canuckistan you see the word "presentation" on the invite and that let's people know you want cash.

My wife and I have been married about 4 years. Given that it was her second wedding and most of my friends were 1000 miles away we figured that we would go away and do a beach wedding. At the time we were renting a house and looking to buy.

The perfect house came on the market and we said, we could buy the house or we could go away and get married (I had not proposed yet). We bought the house and decided to get married on the back deck and it turned out awesome, probably came in under 2K. We had a self serve bar and I grilled steaks for everyone (had about 40 people).

I will echo what others on this thread have said about photographers, spend the money on a good one.

We paid $400 to a friend from work and while we have a few awesome shots, there are a lot of pics he did not get.

 

And to sort of agree with a couple of previous posters, you aren't going to get a $20k wedding for $6k. They do feel different.

I'm sure we've all been to lovely, fun, personal, drunken all-day $20k weddings that we'll remember forever. And we've all been to awkward, cheap-feeling, boring uncomfortable $20k weddings that we spend the entire time begging for the f@&#ing cake to cut so we can go home.

Replace $20k in that paragraph with $6k and it's still 100 percent true. Money will make your day lavish, but not necessarily special. Lack of money will make your day simple and maybe not as beautiful, but not necessarily tacky. Special couples have special weddings; tacky couples have tacky weddings.

 

We had a photographer for $1,200 for the ceremony (then a few hundred more for things like the album, extra prints, etc.), with the total for him at about $1,800 after all was said and done.

Couldn't be happier with his work, his style, the album, etc. There are journalists who we all work with who would do it for a reasonable price too. I don't think price is as important as shopping around and doing what you can to make sure you'll get quality. We were pretty clear on what we wanted, and he delivered.

Ditto for the DJ. We shopped around, and found people who were clear that what we wanted was paramount.

 

1. Set a date.

2. Determine a price range on everything.

3. Hope you found a woman who likes to bargain hunt, as was the case with Mrs. Omar.

4. If you're getting married at the beach and having a video taken of the ceremony, be prepared not to be able to hear anything but wind.

5. Try to be patient when discussing wedding plans with your future wife. And expect many of these discussions. The "groom shows up that day" strategy didn't work for me. She wanted my input. And "oh, whatever you think, honey" probably is not going to be a safe catch-all reply. What I tried to do was have her narrow the field to finalists, and then I'd give my input.

6. If you're doing a destination wedding, tell peeps to arrange and pay for their own transportation.

7. Shop around on venues/restaurants for the reception. Expect to haggle over the menu.

8. If you can get through wedding planning, the marriage should be a cinch.

I got married last May. If you have questions, holler. I'll do my best to answer them.

 

Mrs. Omar and I had a lovely beach wedding in May. Cost us about $6500 out of pocket, which didn't include the reception.

 

We had about 300 folks at ours and spent less than $5,000.

 

How? Do you mean that's what you ended up paying out of pocket, with gift money recovering costs? Because that's about $16.50 per person, which generally covers the cost of cake and punch. Not to mention every single other expense. If you're living in any kind of metro area, the math on this simply cannot be done unless 300 guests paid their way.