On the Misleading Nature of the “Budget Wedding” Community

I got married recently! Obviously I was interested in controlling costs and getting the most value for our money at this event. So like most people do when faced with collecting information on an unfamiliar topic, I took to the internet for research. This was mostly last year, but in the process of finalizing our wedding financials it reminded me of how misleading almost everything on the internet seems to be about this topic. So here’s a little bit of truth amidst it all, partially a rant.

Reddit’s wedding liars

Most people who have done online research for a wedding have likely stumbled across posts from Reddit’s /r/WeddingsUnder10k community. I’m not even going to bother hyperlinking it since it was such a worthless resource. Some people post their final budget after their wedding, however many of these posts are dishonest by omission. For example, one user posted in May 2023 a “list of tips and tricks we used to keep our costs down” which included the following:

• Their venue was free — a friend provided access to their land, which most importantly had restroom access.
• The alcohol was a gift, and all of it was provided by her husband’s boss.
• The photographer, videographer, and officiant were free, performed by friends with experience.
• Cake was made by a friend for, you guessed it, free.

Many of these caveats were not even explained in the user’s original post, and were revealed only by probing questions from commenters. It seems like everyone wants to be part of the “cheap wedding club” in a similar affectation to how nearly every American considers themselves to be middle class.

The user included a few genuinely good money saving tips, such as buying their flowers at Aldi and preparing them herself. And don’t get me wrong, bartering favors with skilled friends is a great win-win situation — you get a free or heavily discounted service, and they provide that as their gift to you in lieu of a monetary or physical gift.

But to me, getting all of the biggest cost drivers for free, then acting like you have some knowledge to share about having a cheap wedding is disingenuous. If you were provided thousands of dollars worth of free services from friends and family, this is about as useful as a post about “how I got married for free” where the big reveal is that your parents offered to pay for everything.

With mental accounting it’s nice to think about the “net cost” to yourself, but it’s not reproducible for someone else who doesn’t have the connections to get so many things provided for free. If it cost them $20k for the same wedding and they received $11k in gifts for a cost of $9k out of pocket, do they also get to join the club and brag about their cheap wedding?

Bloggers that are disconnected from reality

My search also turned up several blog results. “Cool, personal experiences from other like-minded people!” I thought as I clicked on them.

One article titled “The Only Advice You’ll Ever Need for a Cheap-Ass Wedding” — which again, I won’t link due to containing an unnecessary amount of unfunny profanity, cringey reaction GIFs and a general lack of useful information — reveals that the author spent $19k on their wedding in 2018, which adjusted for inflation is $23k today.

Is that “cheap” or is the author delusionally out of touch with what is within most peoples’ financial ability to spend on a wedding? You decide.

Other articles had tips like:

• Skip the DJ and make your own playlist.
• Don’t hire a wedding planner and coordinate everything yourself.
• Make your own wedding website.

Great ideas to consider for cutting costs! But these are small expenses relative to a wedding. Nobody talks about the big ones because then the truth has to come out.

The truth is, you can’t have a “traditional wedding” for under $10k

Yeah, I said it. You’re not getting a traditional wedding ceremony with a classy dinner in a room full of your extended family and friends for under $10k. It’s just not happening. The only way to have a cheap wedding is to make sacrifices when it comes to the big ticket items:

• Venue
• Food/alcohol
• Guest list count

The only completely truthful posts on /r/WeddingsUnder10k are those where the user fully admits to having a non-traditional wedding, for example hosting it at a restaurant, a community center, or in a local park with buffet-style food. Or the small, intimate weddings with 10-20 attendees. That’s fine if that’s what a couple wants or all they can afford. But if you want a traditional wedding and are not willing to compromise, it’s a waste of time to read these communities because many of these posters do not provide enough context to make it clear that they sacrificed in these areas.

One Redditor on a since-deleted account commented about how they spent $5k on their wedding, held at the county fairground. Their mom provided pulled pork sandwiches and potato salad for food, and they had a cash bar.

Personally, I would not feel right about asking my family and friends to travel for hours, spend their money on transportation and hotel rooms, and feel obligated to give us gifts, only to provide them with backyard barbeque food and making them pay for any drinks that they wanted on top of that. So that narrowed it down to a decision between eloping at the courthouse for $50 by ourselves, or having a traditional wedding and inviting about 120 guests.

We did price out getting married at a vineyard that had a ceremony fee of only $500 and provided their own alcohol for reasonable prices, however we quickly realized that a majority of the cost would be having the food catered. Once we accounted for table/chairs rental, linens, and plates/eating utensils the cost quickly became comparable to some venues that did all of this in-house, the latter of which offered far less of a headache than coordinating multiple vendors.

Think about how much it would cost to go out to a restaurant for a decent sit-down dinner and a drink or two: probably at least $50-60 per person. Now add additional costs for appetizers and dessert if desired, don’t forget to account for the “wedding tax,” and multiply this by your expected guest count, and unless you have a small guest list this exercise quickly makes it clear that $10,000 is an absurdly unrealistic budget for a traditional wedding.

How we made a “profit” from our wedding

If I were a less scrupulous writer, I might create an article with such a headline and pretend to be some mystical wizard of wedding cost-cutting and money-conjuring. But I’m not, so here’s the truth:

We spent $25,247.67 on our wedding with around 100 guests because we wanted a traditional wedding experience with all of our family and friends, and we could afford it. Longtime followers of the blog can trust that this is a highly accurate accounting figure that includes everything from the photographer, clothing, and our hotel room, down to the markers for signing our guest book. We spent about $140 per person for food and an open bar which includes all administrative fees and mandatory gratuities, so food and alcohol alone accounted for just a hair over half of the total cost.

The Knot reported that in 2022, the average cost of a wedding in Massachusetts was $46k, which is significantly higher than their reported national average of $30k. Massachusetts is tied for second place in the list of most expensive states to get married in. It would be nice if figures for the median were available, as the average is almost certainly skewed higher by a small handful of outliers.

In terms of gifts, we received $34,700 in cash gifts plus an additional $3,000 in value of items purchased from our registry. In total a net of over $12k more than we spent on the wedding. We honestly weren’t expecting this, and were really touched by the generosity of our family and friends. There’s not much useful advice to give here for replicating this, as the gifts we received are mostly a function of growing up in upper middle class families.

The only practical tip I have is to be generous when giving to friends and family at their weddings, as most people seem to remember and reciprocate. We typically give between $300–500 for weddings, and we noticed that couples who got married in the past few years mostly gifted us the same amount that we gave them previously.

Frugality via… privilege?

For the most part, making optimal financial decisions is a set of behaviors that’s accessible to everybody. It’s interesting that weddings are one of the few areas where this is untrue. If most of your family and friends are better off financially than average, you could potentially make more in gifts than you spend on your wedding. If your family is from a disadvantaged background and you spend $30k on a wedding, you will be eating most of that cost.

In a world where we had far less income and far fewer assets, we would have opted for eloping. I couldn’t imagine taking out a wedding loan, or spending a potential down payment for a house on a one day party. However, it’s an interesting thought exercise that if we opted for that route we would likely have received far fewer gifts, and that hosting an expensive, traditional wedding might actually have been the optimal financial decision.

Why did I write this post? Mostly out of hope for a little bit of truth to make its way into internet search results. And also for some honest accounting — my expenses for the second half of this year are going to be crazy. There’s a long list of FIRE bloggers who have fudged their numbers and hidden expenses to appear to spend less than they truly did, but that’s not how I roll here at Frugal Flannel.

Overall, I’m grateful that through our hard work of saving money over the past decade we were in a position to spend this much on a wedding without worrying beforehand about how much of that we would make back, and that luck of our family circumstances led to a better-than-expected financial outcome. We now have some amazing memories to show for it.