Wedding Costs - I think it's just too damned high!

duchy

The OP has already mentioned family politics - so if those are on the bride's side and her parents are making a sizable contribution -might not go down too well.

I don't think I'd sign before making sure it really was the only suitable venue -what kinds of things excluded others from your very short "short list" ?

jbworldwide

floss2 wrote: »

Yes, do you actually have a budget to work to, or is it a long piece of string?

To be frank, I think your estimate of £14,500 for your reception is :eek: as that is equivalent to my take-home salary for a year.

Perhaps you need to reconsider your guest list. Friends of mine in a similar situation in a very nice 5* country house hotel decided it was everyone for the whole day - ceremony/reception/evening or not at all, and no children apart from their own kids/grandkids. This cut quite a few out of the numbers, and made their costs better value for money in their eyes.

We are still doing the numbers without kids being invited (yup!). I'm trying to get the balance of keeping her happy with keeping my sanity at the amount we are spending...

jbworldwide

duchy wrote: »

The OP has already mentioned family politics - so if those are on the bride's side and her parents are making a sizable contribution -might not go down too well.

I don't think I'd sign before making sure it really was the only suitable venue -what kinds of things excluded others from your very short "short list" ?

This is true, my family and friends amount to max 20 of the 110. The other 90 are her friends and family. So it wouldn't be both of us making the sacrifice in fairness.

As for the short list; size was a massive factor and the fact that of all the venues we saw (knocking on 40) a lot of them I felt were taking the mickey with their pricing, for not well kept venues "poor wedding factory" is the term I used for those.

jbworldwide

CompBunny wrote: »

I've PM-ed you venue details

Don't feel guilty about bringing it up with your fiancee, its important that you can talk about these things!

Thank you for the pm, the venue looks very nice, unfortunately it just will not be big enough

Stephb1986_2

A wedding will be as expensive as you want it to be. But things do seem steep for what they are. You put the word wedding infront of anything and it will triple in price.

I've cut my cloth according to my budget. Is there nothing you can cut back on?

FBaby

I'm trying to get the balance of keeping her happy with keeping my sanity at the amount we are spending...

It sounds like you went the wrong way about it, focusing on what she wanted, and then taking finances into consideration, hence now the frustration. Really it would have been easier to agree on a budget from the start and look for something within it, with potentially some stretching if possible and you both agree that this is reasonable.

Maybe you can take a step back and reassess and agree on your maximum budget taking everything into consideration, ie. how much her parents are prepared to pay, how much you already have in the bank, and how much you are or not prepared to borrow and go from there, both in terms of venue and/or people to invite.

Kyrae

As your signature says you have nearly 25k of unsecured debt at the moment I think you should definitely sit down with your OH and discuss your concerns over the wedding costs, and as it sounds like you'd like to become debt free you need to be the voice of reason over the wedding spending

I think all brides to be want a beautiful and lovely wedding, but it doesn't have to cost the earth... and £25k is a lot of money to spend on one day when you could spend the money on your future together instead, eg towards a house deposit.

Maybe sit down with your partner and try and find out what she wants most from the wedding and which bits are most important to her. Eg if the dress is the important bit then spend plenty on the dress but spend less on the cake or rings. If the rings are important, then spend less on transport or flowers. That way she doesn't feel like she's scrimping on the things that mean the most to her, but you might be able to cut costs a bit.

If she's good with planning and decorating maybe you could look into hiring a hall or event room and a caterer and doing the rest yourselves or hiring an event decorator. That way you can personalise it to make it more special and unique and save some money too. Everywhere certainly seems to up the prices the moment 'wedding' is involved!

Other option... apply to be on 'Don't tell the bride'... then you get the wedding paid for and you get to pick exactly what you want! :P

Ad86

25k is a ridiculous amount for a wedding. In my opinion if course.
Can put it to so much better use for the future.

Mrs_Bones

jbworldwide wrote: »

I'll add now that we can afford this wedding, however I just cant get to grips with how much it will cost!

I'm sorry but that bottom line of your post isn't true is it? With nearly 25k already of debt and talk of having to use credit cards to help with the cost of the wedding. The bottom line is you can not afford this wedding, not how it currently stands.

Kyrae has given you some excellent advice in her post. Work out with your other half what are the important things about the wedding (apart from each other) that you both want and then start to see what can be cut back.

laura_hoggle

Have you looked into a non-traditional wedding venue, which isn't necessarily a hotel? As duchy mentioned, there are a lot of venues that don't advertise themselves as a 'wedding venue', although they do cater for them.

You say you live in Cambridgeshire; are any of the university colleges a possibility? I know in Oxford (where we got married) some of the colleges require you to be a member of staff or current/previous student, but not all of them.

We had our wedding reception in one of the oldest Oxford colleges, and the prices were very good compared to that of a big hotel we had fallen in love with. They were also licensed for civil ceremonies, but we chose to have the ceremony elsewhere. The hall we had the reception in held around 200, and this was one of the colleges with smaller grounds.

Everyone commented on how beautiful it was, how different it was to a 'normal hotel' wedding, and OH started his speech with 'well this was the only way any of my family were going to get into an Oxford college!!'

There was LOADS of food, and by the time people sat down to eat the wedding breakfast everyone was already stuffed from all the canapes!(We did have a huge advantage that my dad has been a chef there for 40odd years, so we got a favourable discount on top of the already reasonable prices, but we budgeted for the full price and are using the leftover money towards a trip to New York!!)