How Much Our Wedding Cost (SPILLING THE TEA)

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This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

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Hey guys, Sharon from digital nomad quest, and this is Sean with everything, Rei. And today we’re gonna go over how much we spent on our wedding. So this has been a highly requested topic ever since we got married, a lot of people have been asking how much our wedding costs. And we’re finally breaking down the numbers today. So according to Business Insider, the average wedding cost $22,500 in 2021, but 2019. And before it was about $3,000 ish, but I think after the pandemic, the costs got lower, because people had smaller weddings. So people do spend a lot on their weddings, some of our friends in the Bay Area actually spent like six figures on their weddings. So this is definitely a big deal. Obviously, it’s a huge occasion in people’s lifetime. So I understand why people would want to spend so much well, here’s our take on it, we don’t feel like the wedding is the most important part of relationships. So as long as gathering of people, our friends and family, then it’s good enough for us. I think if it’s something you value that totally makes sense to spend more on your special day, I think for us, we didn’t care as much. So we actually got paper married in December. So we already were married by that time. But we had our wedding ceremony in March, mainly for friends and family, like people wanted to see the ceremony, they wanted to be there and celebrate us. And that was mainly why we had one. But after the whole thing, I was actually very pleased and was like, Oh, I could do this again. Like it was a really fun time. So for us, it was important to have a gathering of friends. But we also wanted to be smart with our money and not break the bank for one day occasion. I think in this episode, you’ll see a lot of our breakdown, as well as we’ll kind of run through our reasoning. So you guys can see how you could save as well on your special day if it interests you. So we got engaged in August of 2021. And after a couple of weeks, you actually started looking at different venues. So we looked across the United States, we also looked into different countries, like we were even planning on doing a destination wedding over in Bali. Yeah, that was mainly what I wanted initially, but because of COVID and everything like that, we decided against it. And we decided to do one locally in the Bay Area, California where we’re from, because a lot of our friends and family are there, especially when it comes to our relatives like my grandma is in no condition to be traveling. So flying overseas was not an option. But driving an hour to our wedding venue was totally doable. So locally, we actually visited maybe three venues and they were all inclusive, we were looking for an all inclusive venue because it made the work a lot easier, they would already have vendors that they would work with, instead of me having to call a bunch of different ones like for flowers for food and everything like that they already had a lot of that included, which made my life a lot easier. But it still ended up being a decent amount of planning, even though it was all inclusive, but going over the numbers. So we ended up choosing a venue that had these package pricing. This is a 2022 guide. And we had the choice of 2022 or 2023. But we decided to go 2022. And we looked at the dates, right. So if you did December to March, it was free. If you did you know Monday to Thursday or Friday, Sunday, Saturday day, that’s for the venue, but you still had to pay for the ceremony venue, I guess. I think this is for the reception. Initially, we’re like, okay, maybe to save money we could do like November or April. But then I was like, what if we just like rushed it and then March of 2022, right. And we looked at this in November. And when we were actually visiting the venue, they had a poster saying that if you book your venue within 120 days of your actual wedding, then you’ll get an additional $500 off. You figured hey, and then November, we can have our wedding at the end of March and save an additional $500. On top of all the student savings. Yeah, we’re meeting with the person I suggested it and you’re like, No, that’s crazy. That’s too short. Yeah, it was like four months away. And we’re like, maybe we can’t do it. But I was like, might be perfect. The weather’s gonna be good like it’s end of March is better than November, that would probably be a lot colder. And this way I could just knock it out and not have to stress about it. Because I was honestly stressing about the idea of walking down the aisle and everyone watching me kiss you like I don’t know, I was like really stressed out about it. So I wanted to get it over with ASAP. So it actually worked out a lot better to schedule it. So soon doing this, right? If you look here, we didn’t have to pay for the venue cost. We also got a $500 discount. If we booked 2023 The prices go up for everything to if you can see here. So 2022 is a lot better. And we actually decide to go for the Elite Package. So this was something we were debating for a long time. Yeah. So the difference between your classic Premier and elite is just the different things that each person gets, like how many meal choices do we have, what kind of college courses we have all these kind of things add to individual per person cost, but the thing that they don’t show you on this price guide is every venue has a minimum so you need to spend at least $1,000 or so before taxes and service charges. Ultimately we actually didn’t have that many people so at first we were thinking about going to premiere route because it was

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more nicotine free above value. But then it turns out we didn’t have enough people to invite. So then we just said, Let’s go elite, and have a super great time. Yeah, for the elite. They had like the nice chairs that I wanted, they had the open bar. Honestly, open bar was like the minimum thing we needed. That’s like, my number one concern is like, I want everyone to have a good time sounds like you know, I don’t want them to have to pay for drinks or anything like that, to me food choices. I was like, whatever. But turns out, we had the best food apparently, like a lot of people complimented our food, saying it was a lot better than a lot of the weddings they’ve been to. We didn’t even try it out beforehand. So we got lucky with that. I guess. They also had like sparklers Photo Booth a lot of different things. I was like, oh, it’s gonna be nice to have that. So basically, even though we were doing a quote unquote, discount wedding, it actually turned out pretty good. Yeah, and we got everything that you would normally have in a full fledged wedding without paying that enormous cost. The Elite Package also included $750 credit for certain like knickknacks, like, you could have used it for invites, but were like, Let’s just text our friends to like invite them to the wedding and then use that credit for other like knickknacks. That would be great for the wedding. We’ve got like a wedding runner, for her to walk down the aisle, a lot of personalized things like personalized pillows and like

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champagne flutes. Yeah, we just got small things that made it look like oh, we put some detail into our wedding, which is kind of nice. So we had about 62 guests, I believe cluding. Us too. Yeah. And the cool thing is, because of the limited non guest space we had, we only invite our best friends and our super close family members. And now sometimes in weddings, you have to invite like a second cousin or something like that, and you whatever. But this time, we were like really specific. And if they weren’t serious about dating in person, then you get a plus one either. So the cool thing is also because we are setting them to spots, if people were to drop out last minute, we were able to get someone else who was local to come in. So we actually didn’t waste any space. Yeah, we really didn’t want a big wedding, especially with the pandemic. We didn’t want people to be scared people were already a little bit fearful coming to the wedding. So we had to put in some processes in place to make sure people were testing vaccinated and things like that. But also the venue was great and that if you had changes up to like a week prior, you can still keep moving things around, change the guest amount and things like that. So they were really nice about that. Basically, we had the $8,000 minimum like you mentioned, but they gave us all these bonuses like these fancy drapes in the reception area, as well as like hexagon stand that we really liked behind the cake, those normally cost like an extra 500 or so like on top, but they’re like it’s fine, we’ll throw it in for us to like hit the minimum and they didn’t charge us over that minimum. So like subtotal, I believe it was like 7900. But we basically put that up to 8000. The total was $10,505.06. For the ceremony, reception and all the things they included, you know, the LeapPad was about 124 bucks per guest. We also had 995 for the venue, there was a security guard fee of 250 bucks. And then we removed some of these things like we didn’t really need wine or champagne and tell us when it was open bar like we didn’t think that was really necessary. We also were already married in December. So we didn’t need actual ministry services. We just had like a good friend officiate the wedding just say some nice word. And like Shawn mentioned, we had the $500 discount after that 8000 minimum, they had a service charge that was 1760. And then 745 for sales tax. And then the subtotal was $10,505. It was kind of nice, like the service charge is a lot but it’s like okay, I don’t have to think about gratuity and stuff anymore. It’s already included here. So that was kind of nice. So another place where electrodeless spent a lot of money is on the attire for the day. So the men get dressed up and they maybe buy all the groomsmen suits. Of course the bride has her wedding dress Tryon party and sometimes dresses go for several $1,000 Because they’re very nicely made but the thing is you usually wear that dress one time in your life then you bag it up and you keep in a closet for memories sake for us we do we make a lot of sense to spend all that money on one thing that you only wear one time, so we actually bought our stuff pretty cheap I guess technically for the dress I spent about $350 So it’s like to have five I need three pluses 150 For alterations. So basically my $200 came from like five dresses purchase because basically I thought you go in with the actual dress for the ceremony but then when it comes to reception, I probably have to dance and stuff so I was like okay, I probably should switch out to another dress are you gonna dance that long train behind you right it’s not going to work so basically the main dress I spent $162.22 But then for like the other four dresses somehow totaled to like $43.71 Because I just bought them like all on sale on this like wedding dress website. And I was just like something’s gonna work. So what happened was I went to main dress for the ceremony and then I had a tailor alter it

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so that I had a hook thing like under the dress so I could like make the train shorter so that I could walk in easily in the reception area. We didn’t even do a first dance. We didn’t do the mother son, father daughter thing. We just didn’t want it to be super stressful. I don’t have to learn anything. I didn’t want to worry about falling. I was like once the ceremony is over, I don’t have to stress anymore, right it’s like done so it was just easier for me to walk around to table the table with the shorter dress I could have danced in that dress with that hook actually made things so much easier. But I changed into another dress when you know everyone started dancing like the whole party things started so it worked out I didn’t use like three of the dresses are still my closet unworn, but it worked out and I did wear that same dress for my paper marriage in December though there are multiple uses. It worked out from my side. I told my friends Hey, we’re gonna make a super casual just wear a black suit, white shirt and black tie most men have I know we’re having this somewhere. So it’s very easy for them just had that for me. Again, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a tuxedo. So what we ended up doing was I have this white shirt they were all the time I bought a bowtie and then we would dissolve it actually to find the jacket. So we just had his white jacket from Zara for $40 Got it altered so that those V’s look good now stuff and then total cars in a danger on what 100 Something dollars suit itself was 5716 alterations for the suit was $70. It was a $40 jacket but because of shipping into our house and taxes and NPP to $7 Basically we saw this walking around the mall and then we saw this mannequin wearing this white thing I was like that could work they didn’t have in the stores rather get it shipped to our house. Yeah, exactly. It was just a random occurrence, but it worked out really well. And the tailoring cost more than the suit itself. Yeah, funny. So 128 for the shirt and pants and then 9843 For the shoes. So the funny thing is for the shirt and pants, right? The pants are pants that I wear all the time. These are just regular pants that I usually wear expressed anyway, buy one a new one because the old ones were dirty the shirt I bought Express I don’t even wear that one because I wouldn’t wrinkled too much so and I’m just using my J Crew and I’ve had in a closet full time. Yeah, shoes, I got new shoes, because we’ve had before are kind of worn down and 100 bucks for a nice pair of black shoes. You can wear those all the time. So it’s multipurpose. Yeah, so totaling that up for the attire is about $775.13 does a lot better than spending 1000s and 1000s of dollars. I’ve seen some on Facebook groups selling for like 10 grand or like they bought it for 10 or 20. Like for a wedding dress. Yeah. So it can it can add up and that’s cool if you like that, like I’m not judging, but it’s just like this was good for us in terms of bridesmaids dresses, they actually all got their own dress. I just found one on one of those cheap websites as well. It was like I think it was like 60 or 70 or something for their dusty rose dresses. Yeah. And you just tell them by all the same version, right? Just the different sizes for whatever there. Yep, exactly. It’s very casual. Like I know a lot of people are very particular I was just like, Okay, this one and then they just picked it up and then hair and makeup. So I know people get it for their bridesmaids, but I didn’t care either. So like they just did their own. And then for me they actually ended up paying for mine I didn’t want them to but they wanted to gift me that so that part was paid for. I paid for my mom’s makeup which is like 90 bucks. And then for nails I decided to pay for all my bridesmaid says like 140 bucks for nails. I didn’t really care either for nails, but like it was a good way for us to kind of gather and then like do that some of my bridesmaids want not all of them. So yeah, that was 140 bucks. So when it came to their wedding rooms, let me tell you a quick story about what happened and why we decided to go with us. When we first got engaged, we went to a very nice store and I bought her a very beautiful diamond ring. And within two months, she lost the ring. It was a very sad moment for all of us because we spent that money and now it’s gone forever. So because of that I realized that the reason self don’t matter too much, right, which is a symbol of our love. So when I bought this one, this actually looks pretty good. You can’t really see it too well on camera here because the focus, but this one has some very shiny looking diamond things and a beautiful silver band. And this cost me a whopping $15 on Amazon and because I know she likes to lose jewelry about her two of them. That’s $30 right here. And if admiring it’s a very nice thick Tungsten ring, you know, on scratchable very hard surface material. Oh my god, it’s on Amazon for $10. So another beautiful purchase. So at my wedding was actually bragging all my friends bought how beautiful my ring was just $10 Yeah, I think like after losing the engagement ring, I was like this is causing me more sadness than it should right. And it’s like when you buy those expensive things. That’s another thing you have to worry about. So that’s why with these rings, I was like Can we not go expensive like I just want to have something if I lose it I don’t have to like feel bad about Even my engagement ring. We didn’t spend that much like compared to other people. Some people go over 10k I guess that’s normal. We spent two grand so we didn’t go all out for it. I don’t wear jewelry that much. So it’s not something I care about too much. So that’s the story behind the wedding rings. So going back to the spreadsheet

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Looking at our weddings cost for $40.43, because you bought two of these for sharing that $15 each. And then we bought this one for me at $10. And then you have taxes. And then the wedding paperwork was $173. That’s the cost of when we got paper married, you know, getting all that process. So we had some miscellaneous items, the vows I was concerned about, like, if I had a piece of paper and be all flimsy, maybe blow around. So I got cardboard ish paper is $6. And I remember as my mouse. So now when it comes to the welcome and the seating chart, you have to kind of order like a nice big sign. Well, you don’t have to. But that’s what we did, I kind of messed up because when I ordered the seating chart, it was incorrect because people started backing out and I had to get new people in at a rearrange some of the seating because of that, and I ordered the seating chart before all those changes happen. So that was 2282, that wasn’t wasted. And then I ordered a wedding sign that I found was too small. So that was a waste as well. So that was $20.64 that I wasted. But then I ordered the signs again, and that was $51.66. So total, we spent like 95 bucks on the seating chart and the signs and things like that. So those seating charts and welcome signs are just pieces of paper, so they’re not firm enough to actually stand, you’re supposed to put it in a frame, what we do is we just bought some Styrofoam, Michael’s cut it to size, and then we taped the poster onto that Styrofoam board. So that was another $20 added. And basically total for the signs is about $115.12 Don’t mess up like how I did, you should maybe order those towards the end and make sure you order the right size that you actually want. So take out a ruler, see you know how big it is and see if that’s the right size for you. But it did make I think the entrance and like going into the reception a lot nicer. Like you seen these big signs, they look really nice that it added to the aesthetic and things like that they also provided easels for us. So you know, having that off as a venue is really nice. And the person there was kind of like our wedding planner and a sense of they like kept in touch with us and made sure that everything was going smoothly. Even throughout planning sessions, they would ask us all the questions that they needed answered in order for them to prepare our special day for us. And then wedding table numbers. We did buy some with the credit, but I decided to buy new ones because it just looked a lot nicer vata for $17.63. So I also ordered a photo book of our engagement photos, and that was $4.10. And it just has like these nice big pictures of all the pictures we took before the wedding. And this was a nice addition, we had this nice sign in area. It had the photo book, the little box for gifts, as well as other little trinkets, and it just made the experience nicer for people coming in. So before the wedding day, we had a little rehearsal at the ceremony venue and we wanted to have a gathering with the wedding party, like have a drink somewhere. So yeah, we went to a local bar, we play some games like taboo and that one card now again, I Gabs. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was really fun. Only spend like 50 bucks and you know, buy drinks for people, you know, is a good way for people to get to know each other and just have a good time. And we actually had drinks afterwards. So we spent 66 bucks on drinks for that as well. Because I figured after the wedding and be fun if all of us you know went to our hotel room and just like had a good time. That was a great idea because actually watched a movie where they were having fun like that playing beer pong and all these things. After the ceremony. I was like, Oh, I never thought to do that. And the ones that I attended never really did that. But we had a good time at our little hotel party. And we booked the hotel for 144 bucks total with all that was $260 for drinks in the hotel. Oh yeah, another big part of a weddings cost are the photos and videos that they pay for sometimes that can go to like 5000 or $10,000 range as well. We didn’t want to spend that much on that we already had nice cameras with us. We knew that you know we could get some good shots if we used our cameras but we did hire my friend who helped us take photos that day. I also asked my other friend to hold one of our cameras to take some videos of the event I also included here our engagement photoshoot. So we did hire someone to take some photos around Dallas. I thought that would be nice because it’s also like we moved to a new city so we actually moved to Dallas in January and we got some nice photos taken around the city so we spent about $108 for the engagement photo shoot for video obviously it’s just my friend holding the camera but just sent a little $100 gift for that got some video editing done just like a five bucks to put piece certain things together. It wasn’t like a super fancy video thing. It was more like here are all the videos of the event and one little nice one of just some music in the background.

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and stuff like that. So nothing crazy fancy. But I’m glad we have some footage of the whole thing actually. And then for the photographer we spent 600. So like 500. And then plus $100. Thank you, we got photo editing done for another photo shoot, we did like another engagement photo shoot that my brother did for us. And then for more photo editing, this basically happened because my friend didn’t end up really color correcting our photos. And he, after two months, he said, I can’t do this. So we ended up hiring someone on Fiverr, paid $133.61 to actually photo edit like hundreds of photos, like 500 photos. And that included wedding photos and some of my other stuff that I wanted edited. But I think mainly the wedding photos look nice from her edits, I think some of the other ones that I sent over, were already sort of edited. So adding the filters that she added was maybe a little too much, but the wedding photos look really good. And I’m glad that I hired her to do that. So total ended up being $1,071 for video, photo and engagement photo shoot. So that’s actually really good. I’m glad we did that. So if you ever want to save on that this is a route like maybe you can ask friends and family. And if you already have a nice hammer, you could get those photos done with those and then like hire someone on Fiverr to get the photos color corrected and things like that this is a route. But I would say that like a little bit less official, right? Like, if you do have someone who’s officially done this before, like they have done weddings like they will tell you how to pose, they will get the exact shots that you might want. That’s something to consider, I do think photo and video is pretty important. Like when it comes to our wedding priorities where I want everyone to have good time open bar, I want to have some nice photos. So that means I did care to get my makeup and hair done. Whereas like other people probably just do it themselves if they wanted to save money. But you know, we decided to pay for the certain things that we cared about. So obviously, when looking at these numbers, there are things that we could have saved on, but it’s just like, there’s things that we did value, and we wanted to make sure to cover those things. So in addition to all the things that the venue covered, and that included food that included like the sparklers that came up and included the venue spaces, little flower centerpieces that included so include a lot of things. And by the way, like when it came to that they just asked us like, okay, which kind of foods do you want? What kind of flowers do you want? What cake do you want? It was easy, but it was still a lot of decisions. Now going to that number K was $10,505 for the subtotal. And then like adding all these additions and being $2,737 for these additions. And then the grand total was $13,242.13. I think we did pretty good. This didn’t include my engagement ring that was $2,000 that I lost. You know, this is the wedding costs, not the engagement costs, even though I included the engagement photoshoot, but essentially about $13,000, which I think was pretty good. What do you think? Yeah, I think it’s really affordable, especially considering that a lot of our friends, especially those in the Bay Area are spending between 50,000 and even $100,000 On their wedding, or even more sometimes, but to us like this works for us that might work for them and totally cool with it. No judgment again, because I think this is like once in a lifetime that you you know, you have this day to celebrate with your loved ones, you know, your spouse, and it’s like an important milestone. So it’s something that it’s okay to like spend more money on. But I think for us, we’re just happy with how we did it. And a lot of our friends actually came up to us that like it was really great. And you know, when he asked him how much you think it was fair, like okay, now since you said that, like maybe 30,000. And that’s because he prime them to guess low. Yeah, low for them was 30. Exactly. That made it even more special to me, because it’s like, oh, that means everyone had a good time. They didn’t think it was like a crappy wedding or something like that. So I think we got a lot of value out of that 13,000 The photos are great, too. As you may have seen throughout this video quite happy with how everything went. And after the special day. I’m like, I can see why people spend more money on this just because it was actually a really special day for us, like one of the only days where everyone comes to celebrate just like us, right? So that was really awesome. So to summarize, if people want to save money on their wedding, I think first just like see which parts of the wedding you value, which ones you’re more okay to spend money on. But yeah, quick tips for us. What we did was, you know, we checked it, friends and family could help on anything like photos and videos, we hired, you know, someone on Fiverr to help do color correction on photos. We also ordered our apparel online and at Zara, you know, it doesn’t have to be that expensive. So we didn’t spend 1000s on a dress because I didn’t really care for that. That’s only if you don’t care for those things. And then we also shopped around a lot for a venue that was affordable and had a minimum that hit August our threshold because other venues have minimums of like 3050

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1000 That’s probably where the bulk of their funds are going towards this venue. Yeah, I was just about to say like everything I read they’re saying headcount is the thing that matters. Like if you have a lower headcount, you’re just gonna save a lot and also that the venue matters a lot like you mentioned. So for us, we got it $224 per guest bare bones like without all the other things so that was pretty good right and includes food and everything like that. So when you’re doing this shop around for venues and see like, what their package pricing is try to get ones with package pricing, to be honest, like I thought that was really nice, but I would say if you did DIY it, there’s people who do it like in their backyards and things like that they save a lot of money because they might just get like a taco truck and then that like is their food for the night that works really well too. So for us we wanted to have something like all inclusive so we didn’t have to like spend a lot of time thinking about it but yeah, that’s about it. Also the rings right for a lot of the people we talked to they are saying like I don’t even remember where my ring is like my engagement ring and a lot of people did not notice like our rings like were from Amazon $10 They thought it was way more money right? So things to consider if you want it to save money. So hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I know it was kind of a long one but it really went through the breakdown of all of our costs and hopefully that allows you to see how you can save on your own wedding but if you want to spend more on your wedding, that’s okay too. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai