Debt

As we saw in our last article a fancy, extravagant wedding doesn’t necessarily lead to a long, happy marriage. In fact according to a 2014 study by Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon, the more money a couple spent on their wedding, the more likely they were to get divorced. They found that for best results, your wedding should cost around $1000. Considering the average cost of a wedding in 2018 was $33,931, there’s a lot of fat to be trimmed. Here are 5 tips for a cheaper wedding.

Courtney and I have been married exactly once and never been divorced so you might say we’re wedding experts, batting a thousand. We also kept our wedding to about $1000 so I guess we’re statistically going to make it. As a side note, chance doesn’t exist and only you can determine whether you’ll stay together. That being said since we’re wedding experts, here are some tips and tricks to keeping costs low for your big day.

How to keep costs low

1. Get Married in a Church

According to wedding site The Knot, a reception venue alone (not including food or entertainment) costs an average of $10,500. That right there already puts you into the “29% more likely to get divorced” block. On the other hand getting married in a church can be nearly free. According to weddingforward.com the average cost of a church wedding was about $1000. For church members the average was $200, and for non-members the average was between $400 and $2000.

In our case Courtney’s dad is the pastor of a small church so that’s where we got married. After the ceremony we had the reception in the church basement. It held about 200 people and we didn’t have to pay for the venue or the officiant! But even if you aren’t marrying the pastor’s daughter or aren’t a member, getting married in a church is both traditional and cost effective.

Another option is to have your wedding outside or in a public place. You can reserve a park or nature reserve for pretty cheap. And if you put up fairy lights and have the wedding at dusk, it would look magical. A beautiful reception hall that overlooks the ocean might fulfill a fantasy, but going into debt won’t make you happier. There are tons of cheaper alternatives.

2. Save on the Food

The Knot also mentioned that the average price of a catered dinner is $70/person. That seems pretty steep to me since the fanciest date we ever went on cost $100 for the two of us. You might think that the solution to this issue is to invite fewer people, but you should reconsider. Francis and Mialon also found that the number of guests a couple invites to their wedding was positively correlated with marriage duration. They found that inviting over 200 guests correlates to a 92% lower likelihood of divorce.

At $70/person catering for 200 guests comes out to be $14,000! That puts you squarely in the “29% more likely to get divorced” block. So should you skip the meal entirely? You could, but there are other options. In our case we had someone volunteer to do barbeque if we supplied the meat. At about $2/lb we bought enough brisket and pork and barbeque sauce for everyone to get their clothes messy. We also had a build your own ice cream bar for dessert. It only cost about $100 of ice cream and toppings and everyone had a great time!

While you may not be blessed with a smoker-owning friend, there are tons of ways to keep the cost low by either cooking food yourselves or buying something pre-made. While fancy appetizers may make you feel good, I feel better about not going broke. I checked Hy-Vee and they cater weddings for about $10/person if you’ve got your heart set on a catered meal, and they had a surprising amount of variety.

Wedding Cakes

Another big cost is the wedding cake. Wedding cakes are notorious for being expensive and for not being that tasty. The wife of the guy who cooked our meat also offered to bake us a cake. She had done it semi-professionally for a time, and wanted to give it to us as a wedding present. It was beautiful and tasted great! It was small, but we were both fine with that (especially since it was a gift!). She also made a groom’s sheet cake, which is what our guests got to eat, and that’s something you could easily do to save on cost yourself. If you need a fancy cake for your cake cutting/feeding tradition, consider buying a small one just for the wedding party and then baking sheet cakes for the guests. I promise, they won’t mind; fondant is pretty gross in my opinion.

3. Save on Pictures and Video

I have to admit we were very fortunate for this area. Our photos were taken by people at my church. They were our Jr High leaders and we knew them well. They volunteered to do it for free as a wedding gift. The videography was also gifted to us. My best man and college roommate does wedding video and he also offered to do it for us as a wedding gift. Considering wedding photography averages about $2,500 and videography averages around $1,900 this was very generous of them!

Obviously this will likely not be the case for you. I understand that, and I know we were very fortunate in this regard. I’ll be addressing this later on in the article, but I’d like to say quickly that this is one of the many ways in which it is valuable to have a community when being frugal! As to how you personally could save, most people have a friend who does photography semi-professionally or is trying to get into it. They will probably be willing to give you a deal as a gift or in exchange for some experience and photos for their own portfolio.

You could also consider hiring someone just for an hour or two to take professional photos of the wedding party and forget about the current popular photos of the venue, dress, and ceremony. Neither of us really look at those photos, and it wouldn’t have been a great loss to end up without them. You could also set up a hashtag on Instagram or Facebook for guests to use for the wedding and you’ll probably end up with more fun pictures anyway!

4. Cut the Wedding Planner

I’m not sure what a wedding planner is, to be honest, but the average cost of wedding planner is $1,700. According to Wikipedia a wedding planner scouts out venues, juggles vendors, and prepares a budget. If you follow the previous tips, a wedding planner isn’t necessary. We got married in a church so the venue was picked. We handled the food and desserts. And guests handled the photos and video.

The role of wedding planner traditionally was filled by the mother of the bride and the maid of honor. So I guess we technically had several wedding planners. They were Courtney, myself, and our parents. And if you have a simple wedding that is more than adequate. Our engagement period was only three months so we planned a wedding in about two months while we were trying to study for finals. We intentionally made the plans simple and the wedding day was pretty stress-free thanks to Courtney’s bridesmaids.

Also if you get married in a church they usually have someone who makes sure all the plans work out. In our case, the church was small enough that it was just Courtney’s dad doing everything. So in conclusion, you don’t need a professional wedding planner.

5. Other Miscellaneous Expenses

Average cost of Flowers: $2300

• Cheaper alternative: Hy-Vee florist
• Our cost: $100, We bought boutonnières from Hy-Vee and used baby’s breath for flowers

Average cost of wedding dress: $1,800

• Cheaper alternative: Buy a floor model or just a nice white dress
• Our cost: Courtney found a floor model she loved for $500 (including alterations).

Average cost of hairstylist: $130

• Cheaper alternative: Have a friend who can curl hair
• Our cost: $0, Courtney had a friend (who does hair professionally) volunteer to do hers.

Average cost of makeup artist: $115

• Cheaper alternative: What is a makeup artist? You can do your own (or have a more skilled friend do it if you aren’t very good at makeup).
• Our cost: $0, Courtney did her own makeup.

Average cost of favors: $450

• Cheaper alternative: Don’t give out party favors. No one actually wants them.
• Our cost: $0, We fed our guests. They don’t need party favors.

Average cost of rehearsal dinner: $2,300

• Cheaper alternative: Have a small party at home or a picnic
• Our cost: $100, My aunt and uncle had a pool so we grilled steaks and had a pool party.

Average cost of invitations: $530

• Cheaper alternative: Online card printing or Walmart
• Our cost: $100, We found a site that will print invitations pretty cheap.

Item	Average Cost	Our Cost
Venue	$10,500	$0
Food (for 200)	$14,000	$100
Deserts (for 200)	(Probably included in food)	$100
Cake	$500	$0
Pictures and video	$4,400	$0
Wedding Planner	$1,700	$0
Flowers	$2,300	$100
Wedding Dress	$1,800	$500
Hairstylist	$130	$0
Makeup Artist	$115	$0
Party favors	$450	$0
Rehearsal Dinner	$2,300	$100
Invitation	$530	$100
Total	$38,725	$1,000

As you can see we could have easily spent close to $40,000 on our wedding and that’s not even including the engagement ring. Instead of $40,000 we spent about $1,000. Even though we only spent 1/40^th of what we could have spent I didn’t think we missed out on anything. We invited everyone we wanted to, we had a lot of fun, and at the end of the day we drove home together for the first time.

Caveats

All in all these tips for a cheaper wedding are just suggestions. Maybe professional wedding photos are really important to you, or maybe you want a catered dinner. You don’t have to scrimp and cheap out on every portion of your wedding. The idea is that there are always cheaper options and those cheaper options don’t have to be worse. Maybe pick one thing to splurge on, and save on the rest.

I also said that I’d further discuss the areas we were fortunate in. Not everyone is as blessed as we are with gifted, generous friends. I recognize that. But that doesn’t mean that a cheap wedding is out of reach for you. I’ve done my best to show you other ways you can find savings on all sorts of wedding-related things. In fact, some of our suggestions were things we had considered before our friends volunteered to help out! I hope this article has continued to drive home one of my main theses when it comes to this blog: having a community is so important when it comes to being frugal.

Conclusion

It seems that most of the costs that couples rack up for a wedding is just done to keep up with Jones or to brag on Facebook. Those aren’t good reasons to base your marriage decisions on. The purpose of your wedding is to get married and to do it before God and all your friends. Over the top extravagance just isn’t necessary. What’s necessary is to love your spouse.

What do you think? How much did you spend on your wedding? Let us know in the comments below!

Let’s say you are planning your wedding. What if instead of a fancy meal your spouse-to-be ordered pizza? Or instead of a layered white wedding cake, they asked your mother-in-law to make a chocolate sheetcake? Your first thought would probably be, “Don’t you love me?” or “Don’t you want this to be the happiest day of our lives?” A lot of people equate spending more with something being more long-lasting, so you may even think that they don’t care about your relationship!

You might think that spending a lot on a wedding means you’re going to stay together forever, but the opposite is actually true! Cheaper weddings lead to fewer divorces. The more a couple spend on their wedding the more likely they are to get divorced.

Science Weighs In

Bigger isn’t always better, and according to a 2014 study published in Social Science Research Network, it may actually be worse. In their paper, authors Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon studied over 3,000 married and previously married people in the US. This paper is the first time the relationship between wedding spending and marriage duration was statistically evaluated.

The people surveyed were asked a number of questions including how much they spent on the engagement ring, how much they spent on the wedding, how long they dated before getting married, and whether or not they went on a honeymoon. The authors concluded, “Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony.”

Concerning cost, the authors set the reference point at between $5,000 and $10,000 for the engagement ring and wedding ceremony. They found that if a couple spends between $1k and $5k they were 18% less likely to get divorced. And if they spend less than $1k they’re 53% less likely to get divorced. On the other hand if a couple spends between $10k and $20k they’re 29% more likely to get divorced. And if they spend more than $20k they’re 46% more likely to get divorced!

So How Much Does the Average Wedding Cost?

According to wedding planning site The Knot the average cost of a wedding in 2018 was $33,931. (More recent data has been skewed by the pandemic.) If you’re like me you did a double take to make sure you didn’t go crazy. But you read that right. The average wedding has cost over $30k since 2015. And just in case you thought that this was being skewed by crazy people on the west coast, the state with the lowest average wedding cost, Utah, still came in at $22,500!

A Little Math

If this study is true, that’s not very encouraging news! Considering even the state with the lowest average wedding cost was still over $20k it looks like there are a lot of people running that higher risk. Because I’m a numbers guy I graphed this data and it turns out to be linear on a log scale with an R-squared value of 0.986. (For reference a perfectly linear dataset has an R-squared value of 1.0) What this means to non-nerds is that you can reliably extrapolate this data out to cover the cost of any specific wedding.

For example the average wedding in New Jersey costs $53,400! Using those numbers, the couple is 75% more likely to get divorced than a couple who spends between $5k and $10k. Whereas if you only end up spending $3k on your wedding and engagement ring, you’re about 14% less likely to get divorced. Obviously this is statistics and as we’ve discussed before chance doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean that this data isn’t a useful tool to be considered. So, if you want a good chance at staying together long-term, it looks like all (sarcasm heavily implied) you need to do is plan a cheap wedding! There’s only one problem…

Weddings are Expensive

The wedding industry is notoriously overpriced. Things that normally cost a certain amount are usually doubled or tripled if they’re for a wedding. For example, the average cost of a wedding photographer is $2,500–triple what a regular 3-hour photo shoot costs. A reception venue alone (not including food or entertainment) averages over $10,000. A wedding cake costs $500 and is usually doesn’t even taste that good.

The wedding industry obviously has an incentive to convince you that fancier weddings lead to happier longer-lasting marriages. But not only are they not impartial, they’re straight up wrong. “Overall, our findings provide little evidence to support the validity of the wedding industry’s general message that connects expensive weddings with positive marital outcomes,” Frances said.

Considering more than half of marriages end in divorce and that money problems are often cited as the number one reason for marital strife, maybe starting your married life off $30,000 in debt isn’t the best plan.

Have a Big Wedding

Considering wedding cost is inversely correlated with divorce you might think that the solution is to invite fewer people, but you’d be wrong. Another interesting finding in this study was that the larger the wedding, the higher the likelihood of the couple remaining married. Having 1-10 people attending the wedding correlates to a 35% lower probability of divorce than a couple who elopes. And having more than 200 attendees means a couple is 92% less likely to get divorced.

At $70/guest (the average cost of catering) having 200+ guests at your wedding gets expensive. Plus securing a venue that can hold 200 people can cost a lot. Being able to invite a lot of friends and family while still keeping costs low takes some strategizing.

It can be done however! Courtney and I had a wedding with around 200 guests. We also kept our wedding costs to about $1,000 including the dress. (Crazy right? I married a real winner and she definitely didn’t edit this article and add this in). So in our next article we’ll discuss some tips for a frugal wedding that still managed to be the happiest day of our lives.

Remember, going into debt should not be the first thing a married couple does together.

On the other hand, there is something couples can splurge on that positively impacts their chances of staying together. The study found that going on a honeymoon, regardless of the cost, is “significantly associated with a lower hazard of divorce.” They found that those who went on a honeymoon were 41% less likely to get divorced. It seems that going easy on the wedding ceremony and instead spending that money on a fun honeymoon is a beneficial tradeoff.

Conclusion

Despite what the wedding industry tries to tell you, cheaper weddings lead to fewer divorces. And bigger, more extravagant weddings are actually linked with a higher likelihood of getting divorced. While that seems counterintuitive at first, it does make sense that the kind of people who are easy-going enough to make a frugal wedding work are probably the kind of people who will be able to get over their issues and make their marriage work. Check out our next post for 5 tips for a cheaper wedding.

What do you think? If you’re married how much did you spend on your wedding? Was it everything you dreamed? Let us know in the comments below!