Weddings have become insanely expensive

A certain fellow at work is paying for his daughter's wedding next month.  He's already shelled out quite a bit of cash, with more to go.

His other daughter worked at a wedding place here in the Richmond area where the minimum she saw spent on a wedding was $25,000.

Twenty.  Five.  THOUSAND.  Dollars.  MINIMUM!  And I'm willing to bet that you, my dear readers, have seen far worse.  Everybody seems to want to go out and top the last guy who blew the cost of a house on one day.

So when I read this, I went "Yup".

Ridiculous as a “wedding loan” for young people carrying record levels of debt is, a “party loan” is even more absurd.  But that’s what a wedding is, once you’ve dispensed with the sacred parts of the service. 

How did we get here? It’s easy to point fingers at bridezillas and their mothers for creating a culture in which a $35,000 wedding is the norm, but that lets other guilty people off the hook, such as the folks who throw elaborate themed parties for one-year-olds, or those who turn dignified, purposeful old barns into “party barns“.

The Mrs. and I deliberately kept our wedding as dirt cheap as possible, because as we married later in our 20's, we expected that we would be footing the bill for everything.  Over our objections, my family stepped in and said "Uh, Dave, we'll be taking this from here."  I think they were a bit afraid of what the reception dinner might have looked like.  But even after that, the total cost of our wedding, including transportation for guests for several days, was less than the cost for other people's reception dinners.  We managed to keep it under five grand.

$25,000 is a downpayment on a house.  It's the cost of a new vehicle.  It's a top-of-the-line Indian motorcycle, dammit.  And that's low for a wedding today?  There's no way in hell I would recommend that anybody go into debt for their weddings, and I certainly wouldn't tell anyone to blow twenty-five large on one.

To the “earlymoon” couple from South Carolina, let me respectfully suggest: If you need to leave the country to gain perspective on your wedding, perhaps, just perhaps, you shouldn’t be getting married just yet. And if it’s not marriage, but the wedding itself that’s stressing you out, perhaps you could dispense with the party and the party loan, and the pre-party loan, and just go off on a boat and exchange vows like Pam and Jim did on The Office.

Or maybe just elope.