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Can you AFFORD a small wedding? try the wedding voucher book Norfolk, Suffolk

Tips & Advise

Can You Afford a Small Wedding?

One of the easiest ways to save money is to cut your guest list. This is taken as a Golden Rule of wedding planning. About forty percent of your wedding budget goes to the reception and food. If you have fewer people, the logic goes, you will save money feeding fewer mouths.

Unfortunately this piece of advice often backfires both financially but also emotionally. Why?

• Small wedding advice doesn't get to your values around who should be part of your day and creative options to avoid 40% of your budget going to an expensive reception
•Small wedding advice may not actually be true - smaller weddings can turn into a fancier affair or turn into a destination wedding (costing all your guests a tremendous amount of money)
• Small wedding advice doesn't address who is in your family and community and what they expect (mid-afternoon park wedding vs. a sit down meal)
•

Many couples go into wedding planning believing they will have a small, simple wedding, or at least WISHING they could have a smaller affair, believing it would be easier emotionally and financially. But those who come out the other end WITH a small, simple wedding is pretty small seeing as the average wedding is about 175 guests.

And for those who do succeed in having a small wedding, many are shocked at how much it still cost them and some admit if they knew before what they learned later, they would have gone ahead and had the bigger wedding and cut corners to avoid a lot of relationship drama.

Uniqueness of a wedding?

Weddings are unlike any other type of party. They are about bringing two families and your communities together to celebrate, in a public way, your new marriage and joining of your families. Unlike having your thirtieth birthday party with 5 friends or 50 friends, a wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime event. I often told my coworkers, who said I should just elope, that people only come together, guarenteed, for two events: funerals and weddings. I figured it was nicer to be together for a joyous occasion and not wait for someone to die!

Key Stakeholders Won't Care

The chances of anyone in your inner circle agreeing on an ideal wedding is low but as soon as you start excluding some people and including others, you enter a huge guest list landmine. Whether you are trying to determine which family members should be invited - exclude second cousins? Only invite adults? you are entering into family loyalty, notions about what a wedding means, and potentially offending important loved ones. A worst case scenario is when you start building alliances among people (without your knowledge) who threaten to boycot the wedding if the others aren't invited.

Just because you barely know your parents friends or coworkers does not mean you should automatically consider them "extras". If your parents rely heavily on the friendship of these people and really want them to be there for THEIR big day (the day they aquire a new son or daughter-in-law and marry off their child). It is worth considering some of those people have been in your parents lives longer than you've been alive and that some of your friends or coworkers may vanish from your life in the next 5 years as your life changes.

Small Wedding Myth: You can Avoid Drama

As we mention in our article about whether eloping creates or avoids drama , sometimes the desire to avoid stress actually creates it. You can think that fewer people means less fighting, fewer opinions, and more flexibility, not to mention less money stress. But ultimately the people who are likely to stress you out are the very people you may be ticking off: parents, grandparents, close relatives or friends. For every couple who loved their destination wedding there is another couple who has been given an emotional roller coaster by family or friends who don't appreciate the extraordinary time and money spent to attend "your" ideal wedding location.
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