The struggle is real.

Agreed! I'm so excited to marry my best friend and have a beautiful day, but dannnnnng! I hear you girl

Yassss they are. So expensive. Lots of money to be made in the wedding industry!

Im about to take my guests on a giant field trip to Mc.Donalds for dinner🤦🏻‍♀️

Agreed! Why does everything have to cost soooooo much money 😭😭😭😭

Yeah they are haha! It hurts even more to live in a high cost area like Maryland. There's not much middle ground- it's either huge estates or the local VFW (not hating of course).

View Quoted Comment 😂😂 that’s what I told my FH.. lol

Hahaha yeah agreed! I didn’t realize the average wedding was $35,000! We have a strict budget of $9,000 though and are sticking to it. And that’s with 250 guests!

We are doing a DW because we don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a party at home.

View Quoted Comment Bless your soul

View Quoted Comment Smart thinking

I cried when we first toured venues. $10K for a site fee??? Not including food & drinks. 😭

View Quoted Comment I feel you😭 just when I thought I found the perfect venue the price ended up crushing my soul.

View Quoted Comment You just have to be strategic about everything! We are getting married on a Thursday (Discount!) in August (off season, Discount!!!) and we booked within 3 months of the wedding (Discount!!) and we are having pizza and salad so that makes the food under $1500 instead of over $2000. We aren’t doing any alcohol, we are DIYing a lot of things, etc.

My dumb self thought mine wouldn't cost that much. But once I started planning, I realized how very wrong I was! Everything adds up so quickly

View Quoted Comment I have 50 guest and my budget tool has me at 15,000 already.
Teach me your ways 😭

View Quoted Comment I'm feeling this too. But we can't really ask everyone flying in from across the world to then find their way/ travel outside the city. So high cost area it is...

I feel this !!! Yes girl I'm going to take everyone to mcdonalds too lol. 80 people, most of them are children big enough to have a BIG appetite.... so frustrating.

View Quoted Comment

For real! I totally get that!

Even for our 30 person guest list destination wedding, having paid for nearly everything my budget is being overshot. Thankfully only by a few hundred but I had to do a lot of strategic negotiating and planning to stay in my 15k budget.

It certainly is and I found out the hard way where you can't cut corners. I don't have one single decent picture from my wedding. I really thought with everyone always taking pictures, it would be ok. I was so wrong. I also thought I could handle my own cake since I'm a great baker. I realized I wasn't such a great decorator.

One corner cutting thing that actually worked out was our music. We did not hire a DJ. My husband downloaded all of the songs we wanted then hooked up his phone to a laptop and speaker. We also got lucky because his grandmother did most of the food.

Real flowers were not only out of budget but I knew they'd wilt at nothing since I got married in August, in the south. I think it was about 87*F that day. Using silk flowers saved a ton of money and I don't think anyone was paying close enough attention to notice.

We also skipped the favors. I don't know about anyone else but I have a drawer full of favors that I don't want, don't use, but would feel guilty about if I threw them away.