Starting out in life

persa

£10k doesn't seem like enough for a house fund - even considering a 5% mortgage - unless you already have some savings and/or live in North England.

Have you budgeted for professional fees etc?

Worth remembering the more you divert from the wedding fund to the house fund, the less interest you'll pay every month and the more money you'll have for doing things together.

After all, if you have a £6k wedding then have to live like church mice to pay off the mortgage, married life is going to feel rather dull. A cheaper dress for example might result in a romantic meal for two every month. Just another angle to consider.

The other thing to think about is a big mortgage on a lower income. A lot of young couples planning a wedding are thinking about babies. Are you? Of course, the flipside is, if you want a kid, you'll want a bigger house.

Is £500 a month the absolute maximum/wildly optimistic?

How are you saving the £500? Have you looked into say, a regular savings account or ISA?

DevilsAdvocate1

MattLcfc wrote: »

I understand what you are saying, however every wedding I've ever been to has been this way, to me it's just the norm, it's the way most weddings are. I'm not at all interested in keeping up with the Jones's or anything like that, but is it really that extravagant?

Marrying the person I want to spend the rest of my life with is more important than any day, but at the same time it is one of the most important days you will ever have, so is it wrong to not want it to be something special than just something done as cheap as possible?

A good friend of mine had a wedding on the cheap and really regretted it. She was lucky in that her parents paid for it, but absolutely everying was a compromise, including her dress.

The reception was in her parents house after. She was severley restricted on who she could invite and many close friends, such as myself, were not invited, yet relatives she had hardly met were. Again, this really upset her as she felt that she did not spend the day with the people she was close too (we did go to the church to see the ceremony and then had our own celebration at the nearby pub).

A wedding on the cheap is great if that is what you want, but I personally would not compromise too much.

Another friend of mine did not see weddings as a big thing. In fact, it was on her "to do" list before her fiance was posted to Afganistan. She had a baby and her fiance was divorced, so she thought it was important before he left. She got married in jeans at the local registry office with a party back at the house after. Her new MIL was horrified, but my friend told her that she had bought new jeans!

ViolaLass

DevilsAdvocate1 wrote: »

A good friend of mine had a wedding on the cheap and really regretted it. She was lucky in that her parents paid for it, but absolutely everying was a compromise, including her dress.

The reception was in her parents house after. She was severley restricted on who she could invite and many close friends, such as myself, were not invited, yet relatives she had hardly met were. Again, this really upset her as she felt that she did not spend the day with the people she was close too (we did go to the church to see the ceremony and then had our own celebration at the nearby pub).

A wedding on the cheap is great if that is what you want, but I personally would not compromise too much.

Surely the issue here is that she didn't invite who she wanted, not that she didn't spend much. If she had paid for it herself (or put her foot down to her parents), it could still have been cheap AND she could have invited who she wanted.

Kynthia

geoffky wrote: »

We had the forensic photographer from the police do our wedding photos..
They were crap and my wife hates them..

Quite a few of them do it but some are better than others. We had all the jokes about chalk lines on the floor and that he would find it easier if we kept still. :rotfl:

Dunroamin

DevilsAdvocate1 wrote: »

A good friend of mine had a wedding on the cheap and really regretted it. She was lucky in that her parents paid for it, but absolutely everying was a compromise, including her dress.

The reception was in her parents house after. She was severley restricted on who she could invite and many close friends, such as myself, were not invited, yet relatives she had hardly met were. Again, this really upset her as she felt that she did not spend the day with the people she was close too (we did go to the church to see the ceremony and then had our own celebration at the nearby pub).

A wedding on the cheap is great if that is what you want, but I personally would not compromise too much.

You can have a very expensive wedding and still have distant family invited rather than friends if your parents are paying and that's what they choose.

DevilsAdvocate1

Dunroamin wrote: »

You can have a very expensive wedding and still have distant family invited rather than friends if your parents are paying and that's what they choose.

True - but if your budget is not so tight you can probably afford to invite both. It wasn't moneysaving in my friend's case as they decided to renew their vows and to have the wedding they originally wanted.

daisiegg

paulineb wrote: »

A friend of mine bought her wedding dress in Monsoon, was about £150

I think the issue is, theres a certain assumption about what things need to cost.

Another friend of mine got married and made her wedding dress and all of her bridesmaids and not everyone is that talented, but if you look around you might find someone who might make the dresses for you

Her husband to be also did the invitations. There are always ways to cut costs and as I said before, if you put the feelers out on facebook for example, I bet you would find a lot of people willing to help for a cut price fee

Its tough times, where I live a lot of businesses advertise locally on facebook, I bet if you looked around some groups and saw what people did in your local area you would manage to get a lot of what you were looking for cheaply.

******Begin slightly off topic rant********No offence Paulineb as I tend to like your posts and agree with much of what you say - but have you actually looked into this and costed things up? It really annoys me when people say 'find someone local to do it for cheap'. This is often not the case....these people need to make a living and often cost as much as if not more than bigger business! We had a local lady who works from her kitchen who we found on Facebook make our cake - still £280. She was the cheapest little local person we could find. I looked at having a local dressmaker make me a wedding dress rather than buying one - would have cost more than the £700 my dress cost from a wedding dress shop. Looked at a very small local business that made invitations etc - extortionately expensive (we ended up making our own).

I sometimes think all the people saying 'you can make loads of savings, try this that and the other' are just speculating, or basing their ideas on hearsay or on what their own weddings cost 20 years ago. M&S cakes is something that keeps coming up - people seem to assume they are really cheap....well, check out how much they really cost http://www.marksandspencer.com/Wedding-Cakes-Food-To-Order-Food-Wine/b/72561031. I think a lot of the people trying to offer money saving wedding advice (not all of them of course, but some) haven't actually tried to cost out planning a wedding today, and would be very surprised if they did.

Yes, there are things you can do to make a wedding a bit cheaper. Our wedding cost an amount most of you would think was disgusting and means our marriage is destined to fail (which I think is such a cruel attitude). To be fair, we could afford it and did not go into any debt over it and had already bought our house. But anyway as I was saying, our wedding was hugely expensive yet we still did quite a few 'money saving' things. Made our own invitations, place cards, table plan and favours. Bought bridesmaid dresses from BHS when they had 25% off so they ended up being just £72 each (and just as nice as the £150 we were trying on in bridal shops). Bought shoes, jewellery and hair accessories online rather than from an expensive bridal shop, saving a packet. Paid a local A Level student who is an excellent pianist £50 to play piano for the afternoon rather than hiring a professional pianist or a string quartet or similar (by the by, first we approached a friend who plays the harp - she wanted £150 to play for an hour. Local and friends are NOT always cheap!). Etc...

I am saddened by the reverse snobbery that often accompanies wedding chat on these forums (not aimed at you, Paulineb, but a few others say things to this effect). The attitude seems to be unless your wedding cost £7.50 and you made everything yourself, you don't value your marriage and you will be divorced within months. For us, sharing our special day with our friends and family was hugely important and the most important thing was treating our guests well. We knew that going to a wedding can be expensive and can put people out, and we had a lot of guests travelling a long way. To that end, we put on coaches to ferry people around. We had a free bar so people wouldn't be out of pocket just to have a drink. We did everything we could to make sure people were not inconvenienced and had a good time. This all cost money and could have been avoided, but in our opinion, if you are asking people to give up their weekend and travel just to celebrate your wedding with you, you should try to to make it as pleasant an experience as possible for them (and that doesn't necessarily include asking Aunty Doreen to stay up until 3am making sausage rolls..........) All our guests had a fantastic time and still rave about our wedding. For us, it was an amazing day and the perfect start to our marriage - which is going very well in these early days, thank you very much.

I think £6k for the type of wedding the OP wants is a good price. The cheapest we could have done a wedding like that where we live would have been around 12k, if we had gone for the venue that cost half the price of the venue we eventually went for. That is just how much that type of wedding costs where we live and I think a lot of people don't realise. ********end rant

HOWEVER.....that was me just discussing the slightly off topic wedding talk that has been going on. When it comes to the actual OP....I am in agreement that the house buying is more important than the wedding. We waited to get married until after we had bought our house. I think there is a choice.....either wait to get married until you have the house you want, or compromise on the sort of wedding you want in the meantime. Either way....good luck to you.

victory

And breathe :rotfl::rotfl:^^^^^

daisiegg

victory wrote: »

And breathe :rotfl::rotfl:^^^^^

Sorry :rotfl:

persa

Daisygg, us suggesting £6k for a wedding is more money the OP can spare is not a personal attack on you.

Maybe £6k for the wedding the OP wants is a "good price", but this means he only has £10k for a home, and that's not a huge amount of money. A wedding - as opposed to a marriage - is one day only. A home is, what, at least 5 years? Maybe even forever. As you've agreed, a roof over their heads is more important!

The point is, the OP expects to have a fixed pot of money and wants to do two potentially very expensive things with that pot. It looks like he'll have to economise on one of those things, or defer at least one. The easy decision is to cut back as far as possible on the party.