05 Sep Our Wedding Cost $11,500

It wasn’t intentional but I’m writing about my wedding day on my ten-year wedding anniversary! Happy anniversary, wife! It is important to celebrate and recognize each and every year but what a landmark moment it is not only making it ten years but deeply enjoying it and growing.  Ten years ago we got married for a whopping $11,500 for a beautiful day, top notch food, unlimited beer and cocktails, and with over a dozen desserts.  Even when adjusting for inflation in 2020 dollars, $15,500 is an incredibly reasonable wedding cost in comparison to $27,000 today.  You read that right, twenty-seven thousand dollars. Your jaw may drop at $15,000, and frankly looking back I don’t think there is anything I could consider cutting from that day while maintaining its sheer awesomeness. How did we do it you may ask? Allow me to lay it out for you. Step one, marry a farm girl that doubles as a pastry chef and food technologist, or keep reading for some work arounds.

First, we didn’t have to pay for a venue as my wife grew up on a farm in southern MN.  We had our wedding in one chunk of the yard, and the reception took place in a tent in another yard.  No there is no and was no interior of a barn remodeled and refashioned in a stunning manner. We rented a massive tent, tables chairs, dishes, table cloths, you name it, we ordered it.  I can hear you screaming now, but I don’t have a farm!  I get it, most people don’t have a farm, so let’s focus on the concept.  Where can you find a chunk of land to rent for the day or get for free for the day? My sister got married in a public park several years prior to us, that was very affordable.  You must have a friend or family member with a yard somewhere that’s an acre or so that you can work with. I realize some readers will reside in much more densley populated areas and this is not exactly possible in your immediate city or area, but remember, people travel for weddings all the time, is there somewhere forty-five to sixty minutes away that you can get a hundred fifty people to travel to? The farm wasn’t in town, we and our families lived in the suburbs of the twin cities, and a hundred eighty people drove between ninety to a hundred twenty-five miles on average to attend our big day.  Get creative, you might find something, and if you’ve looked into renting a venue for the day, I’m sure you’ve found some very high costs associated with renting it, as well as incredibly limiting vendor options for your food, beverage and even bakeries.

Outdoor weddings are susceptible to weather issues, I 100% understand.  That was a risk we took, and boy did we cut it close.  There were thunderstorms, pouring rain and lightning Monday-Wednesday leading up to our wedding.  On Thursday there was a tornado that ripped through southern MN within just a few miles from our farm.  On Friday, it was sixty-five, sunny, humid, and damp while we set up as much as we could.  On Saturday, it was a perfect day, and I mean perfect day to be on a farm.  On Sunday we flew to Mexico but the suckers up here in MN had another round of major thunderstorms and rain for a few more days.  We dodged a bullet and had a couple backup plans.  The reception was in a tent with walls on it, the lay of the land would have allowed us to have a rainy inside of tent event.  This would not have been ideal, and we had a backup option of inside of a machine shed that would be cleared of equipment, and an old semi-abandoned church in town that my mother in law had some kind of access.  While not everyone has a machine shop or abandoned building, perhaps the right oversized pavilion would be a suitable fit.  There is a risk to outdoor weddings, you have to go with your gut and understand what level of risk you can tolerate.

Next up is the food, we made our own food for a hundred eighty-five guests.  This is the one that usually gets people’s attention because it is hard to make food for ten people, how do you make it for a hundred eighty-five people? Oh by the way you are getting married today!  Well we didn’t make our food on our wedding day, we made it over the course of a couple weeks, little by little night by night.  A huge shout out goes to my sister in law and her years she spent teaching in Baton Rouge Louisiana because she learned how to properly cook Gumbo and Etouffee.   So, our southern MN farm wedding served those two dishes over rice to a hundred eighty-five Minnesotans with likely bland taste buds and perhaps we changed people’s lives a bit that day.  Their food lives anyway.  We chopped what seemed like hundreds of peppers and onions, put them into zip lock bags, stored them in a number of coolers, and each night made as many batches as we could.  Then we let the pots cool, and then ladle dished the entrées into one-gallon zip lock bags, laid them flat, and froze them.  On the day of the event, we had ordered chafing dishes to keep each of these warm, I don’t remember how we thawed them, probably in large bins full of cold water.  We had a number of local church ladies that loved running potlucks that wanted to attend our wedding party, and this was their invite, they knew each other and my mother in law and just wanted a party to go to in their town of two thousand people.  So, they helped us out by making a massive amount of rice, warming and serving food to hungry guests, and then kicked back to relax and enjoy the party.  While there was a bit of a concern of serving a thick soup essentially on a mid-June day, the trade-off was well worth it from both an experience and financial standpoint and let’s not forget the food was awesome!

Perhaps you aren’t a great cook, but if your wedding is six months to a year out, perhaps there is a dish or something along those lines you can learn to cook really well.  What would a cooking class or private chef lesson cost? Can you recruit some friends to lend you a hand in exchange for no wedding gift? It is a small price to pay to significantly lower the price you pay per plate to feed guests.  Does it add some stress? Sure.  I don’t remember it, though, I look back on those nights of cooking much like the hot car rides with the whole family heading to some obscure vacation.  There was some misery at the time, but for some reason you look back on it fondly.

Alcohol, well this one is pretty easy.  We were on a farm, while there are laws to ensure we were respectful of, it was a farm party man and we partied.  We brought in a few kegs of beer of choice for our guests to choose from and bought a pile of liquor and mixers of course.  A couple of my buddies agreed to tend bar for the first hour or so while dinner was being served and eaten, and once it was cleaned up the ladies that helped serve food went on rotation serving as bartenders to the crowd.  Oddly enough while this wedding was incredibly classy and elegant, we had gone through a Boones Farm kick while visiting our aforementioned sister-in-law in Louisiana a couple times, so we decided to honor her and put a bottle of Boones on every table.  There were two rules, first you had to be twenty-one or older and second you could only drink it straight from the bottle.  My brother in law who rarely drinks more than a beer or two got a little tipsy, we’re unsure if it was from chugging Boones farm or if that came shortly thereafter.  It’s a real chicken or the egg situation.  Then there was my since late Aunt, who was quite conservative, and the photo of her chugging Boones farm from the bottle is a priceless memory that we wouldn’t have had.  Moral of the story is don’t add Boones farm to your table unless you want to honor me for some reason. But do your thing and make it YOUR day!

As for desserts, well I married a food technologist and pastry chef, so there isn’t much to say here other then she made all the desserts in the days leading up to the wedding and decorated the cake the day prior.  I think we had something like twelve different desserts ranging from the cake itself (which she didn’t want, but I kindly asked or forced her to make), cupcakes, cookies, I don’t know it was a ton of stuff.  Surely somewhere in your life you must have a friend or family member that can bake and is willing to help or at least help make fool proof recipes for you to work on.  Maybe you have to give in and buy the cake, it’s not the biggest break the bank item you will have on your special day, but in the FI world, we know everything counts.

Those are the heavy hitting items, folks.  I didn’t hit on the dress ($400 I think), rings and honeymoon are not included in the totals above, we didn’t consider those to be included in the wedding itself.  I’ll close with this, looking back ten years to the day there is nothing I feel like we missed out on whatsoever in managing our wedding costs and handling it in this manner.  We’ve been to countless weddings since then, some more spendy than others and while I don’t knock anyone for their decisions on their decision making around their special day, this blog and author is geared toward mostly like-minded people in regard to financial decisions.  Interestingly, some readers are going to find my cost to be extravagant while others will wonder what a travesty it was that we added stress in the weeks leading up to our big day to save a few pennies (over $10k actually but who’s counting)?  In the FI world we find ways to cut costs, we didn’t have a clue what FI was back then, but we were somewhere in the realm of frugal and this was one way we lived out that mindset and lifestyle a decade ago.