What do you think is a reasonable wedding budget?

Well we got married last year, baring in mind in the UK EVERYTHING costs more we spent about £15000 which is about $22500 at today's exchange rate. And honestly, we had quite a small budget compared to most over here - we made everything ourselves to try and save!

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit on that one!

We had a fairly medium sized wedding..we had about 115 people and we had a nice reception and all told it cost a little less than 10,000.

IF I ever get married again it is going to be an all out free for all, no holds barred, Disney Wedding...Craig has been warned..and so has my father (no he didnt pay for the first one.)

We spent about £6000 ($8000) in summer 2009 on our wedding and had almost everything we wanted. I thought that was a lot to spend until I heard of others spending much more and not getting much more for it. My cousin is looking at spending almost my entire budget on just hiring a venue!

I think our budget was a little more in line with yours, Tony. It still sounds high to me, but pictures, gown, rentals, cake, etc...they add up fast. I would probably do that much again...but not much more. I was a Cast Member when I met my husband (he was too actually ) the the WDW weddings were even expensive for us. There was no way we could have - or would have - done it. For us, we would rather have put the money aside for a house.

After reading these, How about plane fare to Vegas to "ELOPE" I think it would be cheaper.

My thoughts exactly. With the economy what it is these days (around the world), saving money on a wedding and instead using the cash for a down payment on a house or some such might be the better option.

My mother would agree with you. She made me offers repeatedly to elope.

I'm not married, but my sister is planning her upcoming nuptials and is quickly beginning to realize how expensive weddings can be! I honestly think it's ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars for an event that lasts one day; like others have said in this thread, I'd much prefer using that money as a down payment on a house. However, for those couples who want the big wedding and can afford it without going into debt, who am I to judge?

I agree with your downpayment for a house comment! I had wanted to do that, but I caved and had a wedding afterall. I kept it at 85 guests and the total cost of the wedding was around $15,000 (although our parents helped cover much of that cost).

In my area, that is a very cheap cost for a wedding that includes limos, cake, hall, open bar, 6 course meal, photography, attire, etc.

I think in Disney World, weddings start at $15000 for up to a 10 people party. VERY expensive there.

Disney weddings are pretty expensive...I have heard of a few smaller weddings done there..but those 10 people weddings probably cost as much as my wedding. Cakes alone can cost between 200-500 dollars!

http://disneyweddings.disney.go.com/weddings/florida/pricing/detail

This website has the wedding prices - their "Couture" weddings START at $65,000! Holy moly!

Mind you, they start lower than I thought for the "Escape" weddings. . .or as Dory the fish says, "Es-cap-e!"
You can get just a ceremony (with some extras included) for as low as $2,000. But that doesn't include reception. Eek.

My wedding was medium in size I guess, about 100 people, but it was at the reception hall of the local Holiday Inn.. nothing very fancy at all. At the end of the day everything cost about $8,000. I had a friend get married in 2009 and wanted to do a wedding at Disneyland but couldn't afford it.. and she still ended up spending about $15,000 minimum on hers.
Weddings can be pretty pricey but I loved every minute of mine. If I could (meaning, if I had the money, haha) I would do it again!

__________________

*Jennifer Lynn* NDW #38

Check out my blog at Jennifer's Disney Adventures

ten bucks

So funny, Pego! Be sure to invite me to your $10 wedding, I'd love to see it!

Haha, so would I! What does $10 even buy you these days?

Sadly - not even the license

That's what I was going to say..our license was $50. And we had to go back to the car twice because apparently you can't bring your cell phones into the building.

Oh wow... my poor sister will have her hands full when she REALLY starts planning her wedding with a budget in mind. I've told her she should just elope, but she has her heart set on a big wedding and our father walking her down the aisle. Can't really blame her... but eloping WOULD be a heck of a lot cheaper!

Ours was about $15,000 in 2002 for 140 guests, this included dress, flowers, cake, alcohol, everything. We won our honeymoon and because our wedding venue double booked us and screwed things up royaly!!! we had to pick a new date, so they paid for airfare and hotel for the night before our cruise and the deposit on our cruise for our planned honeymoon (chosen before we won 4 nights to Ceasar's Pocono Resorts, Cove Haven. So the $15,000 included the remaining cruise price and taxes on the Cove Haven Suite as well. For NJ, this is pretty good deal. They also knocked our guest room rate down from $99 to $79/night, threw in a dessert table and extra appetizers and choices on the buffet and knocked the per plate price down as well. So we got tons more than we paid for. But then, it was their fault for having a wedding coridinator who was corrupt and ended up in jail for double and triple booking weddings and taking money off the top, lol. Ah, the memories

Oh geeze Katrina! Well at least it sounds like things still worked out for you, aside from the corrupt wedding planner. That's a story to remember, for sure!

Oh you have no idea Amerise, lol.

Haha I'm not sure I WANT to have an idea As my sisters MOH, if anything that dramatic happened on her wedding day, I'd be the one responsible for keeping her calm, and that is not a job I would look forward to

Holy wedding nightmare.
Was this all on the day of??

Oh thank god no.

We booked in early Dec 2001. In Mar 2002 we got a call from a new wedding coordinator touching base with us and to say we'd need to meet early Aug for finishing touches for our Sept 14th wedding. I insisted we meet him anyway. So we went in and talked for 2 hours or so about all the previously planned details, etc and then man turned white as a ghost. He said, "you are talking about a sunday afternoon wedding right?"
"Um, no...that'd be Sat night". Well he didn't speak for a few minutes, just kept clicking on his computer and then excused himself and came back with a file. Turns out when we toured the place in Nov of 2001 our date was already booked.

Now, there's a back story to this. My husband ran Gaming Conventions with the hotel so he knew the previous coordinator very well. The coordinator told us the 14th was perfect since he had nothing booked and even gave us some up front discounting because of his relationship with dh. This is why I insisted we meet the new coordinator, I wanted to make sure those deals were still ok, as we had stipulated them in the signed and excuted contract in Dec.

So the new coordinator pulls the other wedding's contract and sure enough, we couldn't have the 14th even though the hotel had deposited our hefty deposit. We were speechless and then dh went nuts and demanded we get our date. The new coordinator then informed us the previous guy hadn't left, but was fired and was in jail, and all the problems of his double and triple booking, etc and said he'd get back to us.
At this point we already had vendors lined up, and guests making travel plans, so it wasn't good. I cried for 3 days straight and dh and the new coordinator fought on the phone several times, we also called in a lawyer friend. In the end, I realized I couldn't dump this on the other Bride, it was bad enough one of us was going through it.

So the hotel offered us the next available Sat night wedding, Nov 23rd or Jan weekends of 2003. We weren't having either. DH and his family both ran hobby stores, so missing Thanksgiving was a problem, and Jan was just too far off. That's where all the extra free stuff came into things. We settled for Nov 23rd, which was the Sat before Tgiving, his mom's store's traditionally pre-black friday sale, their biggest day of the year! The whole staff was invited as they've worked together for 20 some odd years so teh store had to close. DH couldn't take our week long cruise as he'd have to close blackfriday weekend. It was a mess. Plus, and I know this sounds silly, it'd now be the day before my birthday. And I was born on Thanksgiving, so as it was my bday and tgiving often were celebrated as one event and I've always hated that, now I was going to have my anniversary lumped in too.

Thankfully all of our vendors could switch dates, including a priest and a rabbi doing our ceremony. If not, or if guests had bought plane tickets, they would have had to pay to fix all of that too. They knew we could sue, and we could win, so they caved to pretty much everything short of doing it free. They LOST money on us big time.
The rehearsal dinner, ceremony, cocktail hour and reception were all at that hotel, so they caved on room rentals and even discounted the rehearsal dinner, including making me a birthday cake since it was my birthday that night, and still doing the normally included dessert offerings.

Despite all this, the new coordinator was MIA the day of the wedding. (This was all hidden from me as I was kept in our suite), despite his promise the night before at the rehearsal he'd be there first thing in the morning. The hotel was supposed to put together a trellis we'd had dropped off in time for the florist to decorate it. Apparently they didn't, so the grooms men did that. They also hadn't vaccumed the ceremony room yet when the florist showed up, so my mom did that, amongst other crazy things. So dh went to the Front Desk and started screaming at them until they got the guy on his cell, who was apparently at his daughther's soccer game and said he'd be there at 4:30, our ceremony started at 5:00. DH threatened to call the police if he didn't show up to fix all the issues, around 1:30 he rolled in.

Getting past all that, our guests never knew anything was wrong, other than recieving, what was at the time a brand new idea, save the date cards, so that they knew the date was changed. (Many had never recieved one before and were very confused by them). Everything was on time, decorated to my fully written out details, the food was outstanding and the wait staff impressed everyone.

I'm still glad we had it there, the ballroom is gorgeous, it has a tented ceiling look with draped pale pink silks and massive chandeliers. The ceremony room has beautiful white wainscotting and large columns. The lobby has beautiful marble everywhere and made for great pics, since it was too windy to go outside that day, despite the fact that they promised us no Xmas decorations would be up, and in all of the pics in the lobby we see Trees, Wreaths, etc and it was a fall themed wedding. They did take them down in the rooms, without any question.

The hotel is still open, but not owned by the major chain that owned them then.

Yikes! I'm stressed out just reading that! Glad it worked out in the end.

Lol, me too.

Seriously though, it was an amazing wedding and I'd do it all again, felon and all.

Thanks to my brides maids too, of course, for keeping me hidden away that day and taking my watch and phone away from me so I knew nothing else was a problem. I was blissfully unaware and that made a world of difference.

Three cheers for fantastic bridesmaids! I'm glad everything worked out, but I have to echo Brad above and mention that it made me stressed out reading that, too! I can't even imagine having to deal with a situation like that.

Yikes...I would have surely lost my friggin MIND if that happened.

It was definetely a trial in patience.