- Blog
- Bios
- Boards
- Classifieds
- DIY
- Gallery
- Vendor Reviews
- Shop Weddingbee
Weddingbee boards
I'm in the US, but we spent $25,000, which the currency conversion site is telling me is L16,000. We had 50 guests and very much considered it a high-end affair (black-tie, open bar).
Doesnt the cost want make you want to cry? The average wedding in New Zealand is $30k which is about 15,000 pounds. What the fuuuuuuuuu
Our budget is £32k-ish including honeymoon but excluding engagement ring. I came into this expecting a wedding to be expensive so I wasn't shocked by the statistics. I've actually been hounded off a forum (obviously not this one) for openly being a "bigger budget bride". We're not getting into debt and our day is hardly obscenely showy! We just come from huge families (formerly orthodox Jews and highland Scots, our families alone make up 300 or so guests if we invited them all) and were dead set against a cookie cutter wedding.
@SpecialSundae: Gotta say I think that's great - if you can afford it, why shouldn't you have the day you want :-) I'm not so lucky - my parents are going through a divorce (have been for 3 years now) I have no contact with my dad, my SO just bought a house and I have only just finished uni so funds are tight so I'm kinda gonna have to go down the 'creative route' lol and the figures terrified me - thought a wedding would be like £10k on average in the UK
Scarily the average has come DOWN over the past couple of years. I expected to be on a tight budget but our families have been really generous.
@SpecialSundae: Aw, that's realy nice; they must know how great a marriage you two will have :-) I know! I can see why marriage rates are falling lol
I've had a few friends spend about $50,000 (AUD) on their weddings.
Another friend who did things cheaply (ie had less than 40 guests) spent $15k on their wedding.
I don't know how we'll be able to afford it.
@Ms Rocky Road: If you don't mind me asking, after seeing the $50k weddings, how did the $15k one seem? I only mean that when you hear how much people spend, you worry when spending so much less in case people think it comes across in a bad way (have you see Four Weddings lol)
@Scottish_lassie: I actually enjoyed hers the best. It was more intimate and we actually got to spend time with the bride and groom. Plus they spent a lot of time planning things (music, decorations) and it really added to the atmosphere.
@Scottish_lassie: One of the loveliest weddings I've been to was done on a budget of £6k. They kept numbers fairly low, got married in December, grabbed a "last minute" deal (three months out) and called in a lot of favours. It was held in the hotel where the bride worked as a falconer and it felt really personal and lovely.
We spent $40,000 USD (£31,500) for about 70 guests which included open bar.
@winklkr: That makes me feel much better. :-D
We have a similar budget but for 140 day guests and 250-300 total evening guests. (No open bar, though, as that's suicide in Scotland!)
We included wedding rings and a £5,000 honeymoon in our budget, so that bumped it up. We spent over £20,000. We went over budget. Sad face. The things that bumped our budget up were paying for everything for my 7 bridesmaids & flower girls, and booking a separate part of the hotel for me and all my girls to stay in the night before the wedding. Totally unnecessary. We could have easily spent way less than that, so dob't worry about your budget!
We're earning pounds so we are planning on £10k - but we're getting married back home in NZ, so when we convert it we double our money! And get a $20k (NZD) wedding. We have 180 people on our guest list and will be paying for everything, including the bridal party gear and a full bar. I think $20k (NZD) is pretty average, we certainly aren't doing anything extravagent - and trying to cut costs where we can (i.e. DIY, Bridesmaids dresses made online etc). I'm trying to keep my dress cost to under £500.
Most of the money will be spent on food and alcohol, unfortunately though, where we are getting married there really isn't much choice/competition.
Weddings are just crazy-unfair expensive. *sigh* I said 20k+ because I included the 5k honeymoon in the figure, but our actual wedding cost was probably more around 18k for 150 guests. Our original budget was 10k, but we moved it up to 15k about 6 months into planning because 10 just wasn't going to cover everything. Still went over by about 3 grand... Just glad we opted to get married outside of London! Things were a LOT cheaper on the south coast where we ended up having the wedding.I feel like I was cutting corners at every turn in an effort to save money, and it still wasn't cheap.
I'm also a Scottish lassie and we spent in the region of about £10,000. The wedding venue alone cost £4,000. We did skimp as best we could (cousin to take wedding video etc). So expensive for one day but worth it for a lifetime of memories. Weddings are big business nowadays and the cost is ridiculous!
@UK Bride: Your budget story sounds like mine! I really, really wanted to spend $5000, but I knew that was impossible for me. So, we said $10,000. A few months into planning, we realized we'd need 15 or more. We ended up spending around $18,000, inclusive of everything but my engagement ring. I actually didn't keep strict records. We just knew what we had to spend, and I spent it. We didn't really skimp on anything that was important to us, and we had 60 guests.
I still think it's a crazy amount, and I wouldn't do it again, but for the most part, it was worth it.
I don't know the pound to dollar conversion... ours was $15,000. I put that in pounds but it looks like I got it wrong! Oops.
$30 000 in Aussie dollars (not including honeymoon)
This is for No bridesmaids/groomsmen, Cocktail style wedding for 65 people in Western Australia :)
@Garnety: It does - the average cost figures allow for a £4,000 honeymoon
Really surprised how many people seem to spend that or more - I plan to save quite a bit there (my SO doesn't like flying, so I'm thinking of a log cabin in Scotland for a week which costs about £500 lol. We've been before and loved it and it comes with a private hot tub and is surprisingly nice so I'd be more than happy). Almost feeling like I should change my user name to Budget Bride lol
The costs of getting married in the uk are shocking!
Yes its an amazing day for you to remember forever. But it really doesnt have to be that expensive.
I am a professional wedding planner. If i can offer you any free advise on how to save money please feel free to ask! Sadly i am a wedding planner in Portugal. But i can still give you useful advise. :@)
All the best
Rebecca
I wanted to keep the cost of our day as low as possible... but hey we all know that never happens. The fact that we have chosen to have the wedding in St Andrews isn't helping matters as everything seems so much more expensive here.... We are doing loads of personal touches such as my FI's Mum making our invites and favour boxes (if we have them in the end).... He has a massive family but they are not all close so we have some help from his side, but neither of my parents are around as I lost my Mum 3 years ago and never had contact with my Dad and my granddad passed away three weeks ago so we are pretty much doing it all by ourselves which isn't easy since I am still at uni as I decided to start when I was 20! My Aunt and Uncle are helping out also.
I would love to spend as much as possible but decided that doing things with personal touches is nice. Our band is a friend of my Granddad, I am puting together my bridesmaids boquets myself and doing my own make up etc! So excited and love the thought that we will have contributed so much personal effort and time to our day!
The cost of weddings really shocked me... I say it should all be free!!! :)
I am doing a $5,000 USD DIY wedding that includes my dress and our rings.
I clicked 1000-5000 but was thinking in Euros, so I should be in the third option. The flowers were 650 Euros and we went for simple displays which could be transferred from the church directly to the venue and used as displays there so that cut the costs quite dramatically for us there. Cake was charged by portion (80 cents) and to cut costs we just had 3 plain cakes on the stand and the florsit decorated it with a heart-shaped display at the base - very simple, but elegant. Menu was 15 Euros per head with free bar on wine, beers and soft drinks. I think I got lucky in finding suppliers that were quick with budget ideas for us!
EDIT Oh I was right in what I clicked! Now i see it was in pounds! DUH!
@Ms Hedgehog: use this website http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html to convert.
We're hoping for around £15k, but I can imagine it may well go up. It's really hard because we're self-funding, I'm currently still a student (start work in November) and we're trying to save for a house deposit too. But I've been engaged for such a long time (will be 7 years when we actually get married) that I didn't want to scrimp on the day - my single life is going out with a bang! We're having around 100 day guests, 150 evening. And we're planning to not have a honeymoon as such, but only go away for a long weekend and save our big extravagent holiday away as a one-year anniversary present to ourselves to try and spread the cost a bit.
We're also lucky enough to have a lot of talented family and friends, so we're calling in favours instead of gifts and DIYing where we can - Mr CL's uncle is a DJ so is doing the disco, my brother's band will be playing, Nan doing flowers, Mum making the cake, I'm making the invitations, Mr CL's cousin is doing hair and makeup, a photographer friend of ours is doing the pics. The list (luckily!) keeps growing 
I think we'll probably end up at around £18k - that's without a honeymoon (we're doing honeymoon register rather than a john lewis gift list). Sadly Oxford is just about as expensive as London so even cutting corners doesn't help much (cutting the guest list however did help!)
We thought we would spend about CAD 5K (what is exchange rate now? EUR = 1.31 CAD) but I think it will cost total about CAD 8K (We're getting married in Hawaii so it's kind of Wedding and Honeymoon/Vacation at the same time.
You must log in to post.
| Visit our sister sites | eHarmony Online Dating |
eHarmony Advice Dating Advice |
Project Wedding Wedding Songs |
JustMommies Pregnancy Calendar |
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
| User | Posts Today |
|---|---|
| ellisrobertson | 22 |
| MsPanda | 14 |
| aduarte3201 | 14 |
| pengoala | 11 |
| ShellVee | 10 |
| londonchick | 9 |
| londonpeach84 | 8 |
 KimKimmieKim |
8 |
| ladyartichoke | 6 |
| MrsBlueSeptember | 6 |
Sorry, there are no users yet.
Okay, I know this is reaaaaally cheeky but I nearly passed out when I read that the average cost of a Wedding in the UK in 2010 was £18,600! I was hoping to spend less than half of that. Maybe I'm just stingy (a Scots thing lmao).
Just wondered if anyone was willing to share (annonymously in a poll) what they planned to spend or actually spent on their wedding (I'll keep it kinda vague because it is MAJORLY personal)