The Piggy Bank

We're paying for the majority of it ourselves. My mom will be paying for my dress and flowers though.

View Quoted Comment Wow that is expensive! My Fh and I are planning to elope and we are looking at the cost being less than $1k. No family will be present though.

View Quoted Comment Okay, that is very generous of your mom.

View Quoted Comment That’s how much my sisters will be, and she also won’t have family
It’s this Saturday 9/19 and I gifted her the bouquet and boutonnière. She wanted it to be just them, but they saved so much not inviting anyone. Her dress was the most expensive thing, with alterations it was $300.

Your day will be super special too!

For us, it's kind of all over the place! His parents aren't paying for much- just the rehearsal dinner. My maternal grandparents are buying flowers, and his will buy the cake! I had initially wanted to have a budget of around $10k, something I was pretty sure that with those contributions and what I estimated we both had set aside since we both started working part-time, we could afford. Then my parents surprised me while dress shopping and bought my dress and informed me of our wedding fund. I'm blessed to have parents that are pretty well off. I sat down with my fiance after getting my dress to work out our budget, and he told me he started saving for our wedding when we were still in high school, right after our first anniversary. Our final budget is around $20k, with my parents paying $10k, us paying $7.5k, and other contributions paying the other $2.5k. We're really fortunate to have a family who would do that. My paternal grandparents are paying for our honeymoon which is around $4k. We could've refused any help and paid for a little less than $20k, but my parents (who both work in finance) felt very strongly that we should keep the extra we have saved and put it towards housing. My mom's exact words were "a place to live is a better investment than a wedding. Don't be stupid, let us help you" LOL

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I mean, we were able to get a venue that was $150/head IN MANHATTAN. Which was cheaper than places in Jersey City! (They charge for the view.)

Honestly, we heard that quote and just stared. Everything else was at least $165/head, and that $15 extra adds up fast. Of course, elsewhere in the country $150/head is unspeakably lavish. We still had an open bar, excellent food... but we think they cut their prices because you have to go through a parking garage and an ice rink to get to the wedding. You end up directly on the Hudson, though, so we thought it was the most NYC thing you could do.

So, our venue/catering was probably about 60% of the cost of the whole thing. We saved money on my dress, videography, and flowers. (Sample sale, coworker is a young filmmaker, and fake.)

We were lucky in that we didn't have a *set* budget, more of a target. However, that meant we were pretty picky about what we needed and what was extra, what was important and what we could save on... so, yeah, I think we were probably a little over that $30k, but I got a little fuzzy on math at the end. But not by much, it was mostly little things like gifts and programs at the end.

View Quoted Comment Yeah that's more than amazing - ours was $150/ pp (100min guests) for our all inclusive venue in fairly rural VA. But all inclusive included like open bar, cake, two photographers, DJ, yadda yadda. Impressive find!

We are paying for the wedding ourselves but we have been planning for almost two years and my mom has since decided to gift us $2,000 which we are very appreciative of!

I should note that I do charge as much as I can to credit cards and then pay it all off so that we can use the rewards for our honeymoon. Next month I will have enough points to book two first class flights for our honeymoon off of wedding purchases I would have paid for anyway ☺️

View Quoted Comment Okay, nice. Many people have replied that they are being gifted something whether it's big or small.

I was dating my FH for 7 years before we got engaged, I always knew he would propose, but after he did I asked what took him so long, and he just said that he had wanted us to not be stressed about how to pay for the wedding we want, and made sure we could do so before planning a wedding. So with that said we are paying for it ourselves, minus my MOH & her mother are paying for simple flowers for us. Our budget was $13,000 but with every major vendor booked (venue, photo, dj, food) we are at around $7,000

We are paying for everything except the venue ($1500 from my parents), my dress ($900 after alterations from my grandparents), and the rehearsal dinner ($200 from my FH's mother). We are able to pay for these things, we're actually about $10,000 under budget, but they insisted on doing something to help. We are both teachers and have been saving almost $1000 a month for over 2 years.

Ours was a very low budget wedding. We paid for pretty much everything except my grandma paid for the food. Ours was around 5,000

Our parents helped with some of the expenses but FH and I are paying for the bulk of everything ourselves. We had a long engagement which helped us save money and we saved where we could! Thanks to Covid we had an additional 6 months to save and will have a smaller guest list so that helps as well. In fact, our venue removed the food and beverage minimum due to reduced guests due to Covid.

We will be paying for the wedding ourselves. Parents offered to help for small things like buy my dress, and his parents are paying for his tux.

View Quoted Comment That was generous of them!

Paying ourselves like many of the other couples here. We’ve received zero financial support and have not asked for any either.

View Quoted Comment Good for you with being independent.