Wedding Forum - The Big Day cost...

Hi Becca and welcome! I got married two months ago and our final cost was just shy of £14,000 (not including honeymoon). We had a church wedding and our reception in a marquee at an old farm house, but we did have 123 day guests and nearly 170 evening guests which really bumped the cost up as they all needed feeding and watering! We had no problems with booking anything but I did find that everything was much more expensive than I thought it would be. Cost really depends on what type of wedding you want and what you need, whether you are paying for the bridal parties outfits, hair, make-up (we paid for five bridesmaids and three groomsmen on top of our own outfits), what kind of photography coverage you want, what kind of transport you want if any, what type of wedding dress you want etc. There are ways of cutting costs, it's just whether or not you are happy to go without things or have cheaper things as to how much it will cost you :) xxx

Looks like we'll be getting married around the same time. We have just started seriously looking at venues etc (been engaged 15 months) and my brain is fried! Like Linzi-Jo said, things seem to cost more than I thought they would. You just have to decided what you can afford and what you really want and would be disappointed to go without. x

Ours is looking to be around 14k not including honeymoon at the moment for a Saturday in August.
But there are ways of cutting costs, eg. having registry office wedding, having a buffet instead of evening meal, and choosing days/times of year that are classed as off-peak :)

Welcome to the gang!
Our Civil Partnership cost us under 1k to do it... When we remarry I have set aside between 6-8k and intend to have change after including the american honeymoon!!

We are looking at spending around £10k. We managed to get a really good package deal with our venue which includes wedding breakast, drinks package, evening buffet, room hire, overnight accommodation for me and h2b and disco for the evening which came in at £3k.

Ours is looking like it will be around £14K including the honeymoon. We have found that it's not what you know it's who you know. We have a friend doing our flowers for a reasonable price, our wedding car is free (it's a friends car and we're getting it for free with him driving it in exchange for an invite to the wedding), my Dad is paying for my Half Sisters bridesmaid dress and my Sister is paying for my Nieces flowergirl dress (I didn't ask they offered). We also got a discount on the DJ because we saw him at a friends birthday party a few years ago.

We found it also pays to book early. We got a discount on the suit hire because we booked early (OHs Sister hired the suits for her wedding from the same shop and we're paying over £25 less for the same number of suits).

Our photographer also gave us a £100 discount because our wedding in April is just outside full on wedding season, apparently.

We've done a spreadsheet of what we think it will cost and what each thing actually costs. It was quite scary when we first looked at it but helped us plan our budget.

Good luck with your planning :o)

My budget is 8000, the wedding will be at Lincolnshire, and as far as I've seen, we won't spend all this money (not including honeymoon). We have loads of time to find ways to make it cheap and still make it special. I found the wedding dress I dream about for £250 and I can't wait to be able to purchase it lol

Our wedding is at about £12k without a honeymoon. That depends on how much we are gifted as we won't be going anywhere until about 4 months after our wedding.

We are the same flossie, were also paying about 6k and my dad and OHs parents paying about a quarter each.

I think one of the biggest factors to keeping the cost down is the size of the guest list and also venue. do as much DIY as you can and use friends/family to help if they have something to offer (anyone with sn interest in photography or people who like baking could help, creative people with invites)

Our wedding is costing us about £5500, honeymoon not included (that's an extra £4k!). That is with my sister paying for flowers, my parents paying for venue, a friend doing our photography for our present, another doing all our stationery, my Gran buying my bridesmaid dresses, a friend paying for our wedding car and £1000 in engagement gift money having went towards deposit. We would have had to wait another year at least for our wedding if we were paying for it all ourselves. The help we are having/had has been amazing.
I think poeple spend so much on gimmicky things like LED dancefloors, candy carts etc which are all nice if you really want and like that stuff, but it all adds up to so much!!

Its not always easy to budget but you have to be strict with yourself...
I am working with a 4k budget and ii have recently lost my job so i am sticking to it..

i have made a lot of choices for things to be DIY, such as invites, cakes and favours which i hope cut costs..
friends with a nice car, i have found photographer and possible videographer for free..

and i plan to go to france to get alcohol for the day.

the catering is what is taking up the majority of the expense so im thinking to cut the guest that eat and prepare an evening buffet for evening guests.


it can be done.. you just have to be disciplined.

our wedding so far has reached around £37k and that's without the honeymoon which we've priced up at around £5-6k we never had an initial budget but i think looking back at it if we had sat down and decided what we want to spend on each thing we probably wouldn't of gone as overboard! lol
xx

We had a budget of £5000 and have gone past that. You can try and guess the cost of things but there is just no way you can be sure until you get out there and look. We found the venue has a lot of costs that are difficult early on to guess, such as the cost for food depends on your guest list, which at the time we only had a rough idea of. We wanted a small 40 day guests wedding and as much as we have stayed small that number has gone up to 60, which at about £20 a head per course is a lot of money. As for flowers etc we shopped around and we have gotten all our flower including button holes and our favors from the same person for about £150 Our entertainer is quite pricey but for the length of time we have him for it's not too bad and cheaper than the string quartet my H2B wanted. For my dress, I wasn't cutting corners, I knew what I wanted and it had to be perfect, I really hit lucky to find the most perfect dress on sale, reduced from about £1500 to £300 simply because they didn't have the space so the agreement was I could have it cheaper if I took it home with me there and then and stored it myself, go back in January for her to measure an adjust it if needs be.
We're up to approx. £7000 all together, honeymoon is looking to cost approx. £3500 for 16 days within 2 different countries.

My parents are paying for my wedding too, but since £1=R$4 (brazilian money), it's not that easy lol I've set £8k as the maximum that I can think about spending, BUT I don't want to spend this much, I want to spend up to £6k.

We don't really have a budget but are trying to do as cheaply as possible. Both of us have quite a good sense of what we are willing to pay for something. I expect we will pay around £7000 in total excluding honeymoon. We are going to ask for money towards honeymoon as our gift list. We will be going home to New Zealand though so hopefully we can keep costs down there by sometimes staying with friends and family.


Our biggest cost will be the reception at £70 per head with a minimum of 60 guests, but this includes meal, drinks reception,drinks for the toasts, setting up of room, evening buffet, chair covers and sachets, a room of us on the wedding night and discounted rates for guests. Oh and the seating plan.

We are making invitations and save the dates ourselves. I haven't decided whether I will do the centrepieces as well or not.
My dress is £825 brand new, for once it wasn't the most expensive one going that I fell in love with.
The rings we will probably get from one of the bespoke companies that come to your house as they seem to be cheaper than the high street.

It depends what you want for your day. If you just want a small intimate wedding with close family it will be a lot cheaper than a big extravagant affair with everyone you have ever met. You may just need to compromise on a few things if you can't afford them.

Congratulations! We are getting married in around the same time as yours though nothing is booked yet as need to meet with the priest first then look at venues. Our budget is around £25K excluding the honeymoon. My aunt said we should have a 20% of the budget for back up because of inflation and prices could change without prior notice (small prints). Our priority is FOOD - both families are foodies and good cooks and we would like our guests to enjoy the food. Then photography as you would always look at photos; then make up/attire.
We are both paying for the wedding (none of the parents or family members) as we are old enough and had been in the work force for a long time AND it is our wedding, our money and decisions are up to us. We don't want someone paying for cake and then tells us what we can't or can have.
One of my friends got married in the summer on a budget under $5,000 - food and drinks were provided by family. They actually had a potluck of different salads, cheese, fruits, 2 types of meat. No wedding cake, just two different cakes - one was gluten free, and two different pies.

Cor, Bride2B28 you are so lucky! Your parents are very generous! Our budget started at £17K but has slowly crept up to £25K after looking around at places! I have even gone over that to £27K, but nothing has been booked yet, so I'm trying to skim money off of everything before I commit to anything, and that isn't including the Honeymoon or rings!
My main priority is photos and videographer, which is coming in at £4K between them, then the venue with food and alcohol, then after that the Dress and Suit, then the rings..and from there onwards, it's skim, skim, skim! Haha! X

Oh and Barbie86, could I ask where you went on Honeymoon? As £6.8K sounds like you got an amazing Honeymoon! I could only dream! X

This was an article in the 3v3n1ng 5t@nd@rd yesterday:


The best man rises to give his wedding speech, and asks the guests to charge their glasses. Then he thanks those to whom the contents of the glasses are being charged — and well he might, given the average knot-tying extravaganza now leaves brides and grooms (or their generous relatives) with little change from £30,000.

You could buy the boxroom of a house (on the outskirts of London, if it required total refurbishment) for that. Yet instead we hear tales of couples remortgaging, or going into heavy debt, to put on pricey wedding bashes with celebrity bands, 12-tiered cakes and £5,000 dresses. So perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that official Government statistics now reveal that weddings are becoming the preserve of the wealthy.Still, marriage being for (the) richer but not the poorer is a sad state of affairs. Since 2001, those in the top tax bracket have become twice as likely to be hitched, Office for National Statistics figures show, and by the time they have children, nine in 10 of the richest Britons are married. Yet for those earning the minimum wage or less, the figure is half that.The figures saw perfectly-named Christian Guy, director of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), draw a sad conclusion: “The cost of getting married is putting people off having a wedding.”Britain’s £10 billion nuptials industry has all become a bit inflated. I loved getting married so much I wrote a book on it: inspired by rude encounters with the big-headed wedding industry, I asked suppliers what brides and grooms could do to cut the cost. For the simple fact is  splashing the cash won’t make your diamond last for ever. In fact, US academic research found that couples who spent more than average on their wedding had a 46 per cent likeliness of getting divorced — while that risk fell to 29 per cent for those who spent less than £10,000.Or, as Sex in the City’s wise Samantha Jones put it: “Big ring? Big wedding? Bad relationship, honey.”Yet there’s no need for Britain’s developing “marriage gap”, as it’s been dubbed by The Spectator magazine, which obtained the ONS figures. Those extravagant stag and hen weekends, where bride- and groom-to-be and friends congregate on easyJet flights (with half their friends moaning to each other that they could have spent the £500 budget on a holiday of their own choice); those expensive (and ridiculous) doves released after the wedding ceremony; that choreographed dance the newly-weds bought three months’ worth of lessons to learn? They’re not the elixir for long-term relationship success.Marriage, however, really can be. Politically correct, scared-for-their-seats Parliamentarians might be too terrified to say so, but saying “til death us do part” statistically does make you more likely to stay with your partner. Fewer than one in 10 married parents have split by the time a child is five, compared with more than one in three who were not married, according to the CSJ. Of parents not married or living together when a child is born, the break-up rate after five years is a massive 60 per cent.Marriage fell out of favour during the recession but it needn’t be so closely bound to the affordability of a show-off wedding. The Beatles had it right — all you need is love.