It's lovely that you want to have a dream wedding, but reality is that you have so much debt that you had to move back in with your parents. Spending any money on a wedding right now, is a bad idea because, well, you don't have the money. Please don't go into even more debt to have a party.
If it's important to get married, and I have to ask if you're in any position to get married given the debt and both of you needing to live with your respective parents, you can elope in the woods for far less than $5k. Simply pay to get a license, drive to the woods with a few family members and/or friends and have the ceremony. At most, offer cake, punch and a few simple finger foods for the reception.
You two are living with your parents and are scraping by financially, so spending 5k on a wedding is not in your best interest. Don’t fret! Keep the wedding party extremely small and you could even make it a team effort. Everyone could bring a dish or a bottle of champagne and set up something nice in the backyard or public park. (String lights really set the mood for cheap!)
- Facebook marketplace is great for used decor.
- bring a Bluetooth speaker for music don’t hire a DJ
- sam’s club/Costco sells bulk roses for super cheap
-JJ’s house website sells wedding dresses for like $200
- chair &table rentals are cheap. Rent everything
I know your fiance wants a princess wedding but if you don’t have the royal funds that’s gotta wait until maybe an anniversary (you can have a more elaborate vow renewal party down the road).
Look. I frankly think you to have bigger problems than a wedding. I think focus should he moving out getting place of your own than marriage. You can always have courthouse then big wedding later
I'm less interested in the wedding stuff and more interested in how you plan to make the marriage work if neither of you make enough right now to live on your own and she has a kid to boot. This sounds like a recipe for financial disaster. I really hope you guys have some kind of plan.
As for a cheap wedding, churches are cheap. I have plenty of friends who started out with nothing and had a wedding in a church with a cake/punch reception in the attached gym and the honeymoon was a night at a nice hotel in town or something. One couple I know (who has been married 30 yrs) went tent camping for their honeymoon at a local reservoir. You don't need much for a wedding if you want a basic one. What does she want?
We will be able to live on our own once we get things paid down.
In terms of finances we live in a lower income area in Ohio, we collectively only have about 10 grand in debt. We live at our parents by choice, I just moved back from out of state and she needed a place to stay after a failed marriage.
In terms of a better paying job it's going to be awhile. Jobs that you don't work 80 hour work weeks out here, you make like under 40k a year. I'm working on certificates, but a college degree is a no no for me.
What's worse? Where I work requires a skill set, not everyone can do it, jobs pay booty in Ohio.
Average income household is 61k combined and
Median is 50k
Tried two trades
With my learning disability they were not for me
I can only do technology unfortunately, I'm working on certificates, but I got fired from both trades when I was giving it my all as an apprentice.
If you want to have a grand wedding (which it sounds like you do), it looks like your only option is to wait, pay of your debts, and work on saving. Good luck!
Do you want her to feel like a princess for one day or every day? Relax and listen to her. She says she likes the elopement idea so do it. You’re in your head with the dream you want to give instead of the reality that is. I guarantee that she’d say she’d rather a good marriage than a great wedding. She had a crappy marriage already.
Have you looked into local parks? I'm not sure where in Ohio you are, but, if you're near Cleveland, you can rent a pavilion in the Metroparks for $300 for a weekend date. Many of the pavilions include electricity, fireplaces, etc. They also include picnic tables and grills (though I'd suggest saving money by not serving substantial food). If you held the wedding outside of a traditional meal time (say, 2:00 - 4:30), you could get away with cake, non-alcoholic drinks, and snacks. A Costco 1/2 sheet cake is about $35 and can feed about 50 people. Sheet cakes from Walmart are priced similarly. Grab some big bags of chips and pretzels ($15), bottled water (Costco and Walmart have 40 packs for $5-$6, so let's say $15 total to make sure there's enough for everyone), and spend $150 combined on vegetables (carrots, cucumbers, and bell peppers are usually cheap) and fruit (melon tends to get you a good bang for your buck), and you have almost everything you need for a short reception for about $500, including the cost of pavilion rental. You might be able to rent a pavilion elsewhere for much cheaper. In a park, you won't need many decorations, because nature will provide the decoration, and you can pick up a bouquet of flowers from Walmart or Trader Joe's the morning of the wedding for $25.
You can always throw a blowout anniversary party in ten years if/when you're in a better place financially.
The previous suggestions are all great— I want to also jump in and say that if you want catering, etc., a party at an event center isn’t going to be substantially cheaper than a wedding itself. A party still requires a rental feed for the space, per price head for catering, decorations, etc. The reception is definitely the more expensive of the two parts.
The Ohio state Capitol building is gorgeous and you can have your wedding there for free. It is your first amendment right to assemble. You just need to let them know you want to do it. There are videos on their website showing g you the building and how to arrange it.
What does she want? That’s really what this comes down to. Some people love the weddings with a big family, some people truly just want a small elopement. Ask her what she wants.
You can do a backyard wedding with family or a small church (or even a local park) if that’s what you both want, and it will keep the costs down.
An elopement can also be wonderful. This is what we did and it was very cheap and simply beautiful. But this is your wedding and both of you need to decide who needs to be there and what you want.
My brother married his wife under similar circumstances. They lived at home with parents separated for the first 3 years of marriage, put the grind in and now 10 years later they are homeowners with 2 kids. Their only debt is their mortgage. It sounds to me like you two are doing your best to come out on top. You still deserve a nice wedding day even if it’s not an expensive one.
That said, it should definitely not be an expensive one. My brother got married at the local court and then afterward we had a luncheon at a restaurant for about 15 people. We went out that night to the bars with all our friends as a “dance reception”. My SIL rented her dress from rent the runway, my brother wore a suit he already owned. I made her bouquet, she went to the salon and got a blowout and then did her own makeup. They baked their own wedding cake. No photographer, just our digital cameras (it was 10 years ago lol) and phones. For their 10th anniversary they are finally having professional family photos done. So it was very small, as much renting/DIY/pre-owned as possible, and it was still a beautiful day.
Congrats and good luck!
I would suggest DIY whatever you can, trimming the guest list as much as you can, like an intimate wedding of 25 to 50 people maybe, and finding a reasonably priced venue and dress. The dress and the venue/food for guests are the biggest ticket items, so if those are reasonable that cuts your cost a ton automatically.
You can also look at things like Thursday night, Sundays or Sat mornings for the wedding event time, those less popular times usually have discounted pricing.
You can still have a great wedding and honeymoon and not break the bank, good luck to you!👍✅
First of all kudos to you for wanting to create a significant, meaningful day within your budget!
My FH and I are doing something very similar to what you’re thinking about - eloping at the courthouse, with a family reception to follow. We’re hiring a photographer and videographer for the ceremony, and we’re live streaming it for our immediate families. We plan to show the full video at our reception.
Some splurge-y but reasonable ideas to make your fiancée/yourself feel special on the day of, if you decide to elope:
Rent a cool, sporty/luxurious/fun car from Turo for the day, to use as a “getaway car” and make for some fun pictures. I’m looking in my area, a HCOL, and finding all sorts of sports and luxury vehicles for less than $100/day, as an example.
Get the best hotel room you can afford, just for the night. Go all out: ask the concierge to help you arrange for champagne, a mini cake, and some late night snacks in the room. They’re usually happy to accept an Instacart delivery and place it in your room. If you tell them it’s your wedding night sometimes they’ll add other cute/fancy touches!
Order in advance a flower drying kit (a box with silica sand) so that she can dry her bouquet. This can later be turned into lots of pretty mementos such as resin sculptures, shadowboxes etc so she’ll always have that keepsake.
Make sure your photographer gets a few photos of just her - she’ll feel extra special and princessesy!
Congrats and best wishes!
"The issue that arrives is that with our elopement option she won't get the traditional wedding feeling, the cheesy games, the catering, seeing the whole family, the tradition."
You can make her feel like an absolutely fairytale princess in a private elopment if the "princess feeling and romance" are more important than the cheesy games with all the people.
Once you are in better finances, you can organize a 1y, 3y, 5y or a 10y anniversary party and wine and dine your people then.
Plan a magical elopment day/weekend for just the two of you: hotel room, surprise her with a little present or her favorite food in the morning, drop her off at the hair & makeup, do the ceremony, make a big speech about love and her beauty etc, play heart-breakingly beautiful music in the woods, have a photographer capture the ceremony and to do a photoshoot after. Whisk her away to a romantic sunset picnic - bring the photographer. Carry her over the threshold to the hotel room where the employees have decorated it for you with rose petals and chocolates and champagne and the cheesiest towel swans they can muster. Have Bridgerton sex with long seductive slow-mo undressing by the fireplace. Real life romance movie montage.
As long as she doesn't get the dress dirty in the forest, she can sell it afterwards. If she is happy with a more fairy-princess look (which would go dreamily with a forest elopment), she can find gorgeous white summer dresses or floral dresses for couple hundreds.
Trust me, give her all the bells and whistles privately and she won't want to share you or your special day with anyone. And it will be way cheaper than hosting a hundred people somewhere for hours and hours of food, alcohol, music, decor etc.
It's lovely that you want to have a dream wedding, but reality is that you have so much debt that you had to move back in with your parents. Spending any money on a wedding right now, is a bad idea because, well, you don't have the money. Please don't go into even more debt to have a party. If it's important to get married, and I have to ask if you're in any position to get married given the debt and both of you needing to live with your respective parents, you can elope in the woods for far less than $5k. Simply pay to get a license, drive to the woods with a few family members and/or friends and have the ceremony. At most, offer cake, punch and a few simple finger foods for the reception.
You two are living with your parents and are scraping by financially, so spending 5k on a wedding is not in your best interest. Don’t fret! Keep the wedding party extremely small and you could even make it a team effort. Everyone could bring a dish or a bottle of champagne and set up something nice in the backyard or public park. (String lights really set the mood for cheap!) - Facebook marketplace is great for used decor. - bring a Bluetooth speaker for music don’t hire a DJ - sam’s club/Costco sells bulk roses for super cheap -JJ’s house website sells wedding dresses for like $200 - chair &table rentals are cheap. Rent everything I know your fiance wants a princess wedding but if you don’t have the royal funds that’s gotta wait until maybe an anniversary (you can have a more elaborate vow renewal party down the road).
Buy Nothing sites are great for “ISO”— in search of decor. Dollar stores often have fun wedding or party items.
Look. I frankly think you to have bigger problems than a wedding. I think focus should he moving out getting place of your own than marriage. You can always have courthouse then big wedding later
In the eyes of the state, after you are married, you have joint finances, so whatever you spend is borrowing from her very near future self
I'm less interested in the wedding stuff and more interested in how you plan to make the marriage work if neither of you make enough right now to live on your own and she has a kid to boot. This sounds like a recipe for financial disaster. I really hope you guys have some kind of plan. As for a cheap wedding, churches are cheap. I have plenty of friends who started out with nothing and had a wedding in a church with a cake/punch reception in the attached gym and the honeymoon was a night at a nice hotel in town or something. One couple I know (who has been married 30 yrs) went tent camping for their honeymoon at a local reservoir. You don't need much for a wedding if you want a basic one. What does she want?
We will be able to live on our own once we get things paid down. In terms of finances we live in a lower income area in Ohio, we collectively only have about 10 grand in debt. We live at our parents by choice, I just moved back from out of state and she needed a place to stay after a failed marriage.
Why not focus on getting debt down first and a better paying job. Money issues are biggest divorce predictor
In terms of a better paying job it's going to be awhile. Jobs that you don't work 80 hour work weeks out here, you make like under 40k a year. I'm working on certificates, but a college degree is a no no for me. What's worse? Where I work requires a skill set, not everyone can do it, jobs pay booty in Ohio. Average income household is 61k combined and Median is 50k
You could go to trade school and then make over $100k a year in a trade. Doesn’t have to be college
Tried two trades With my learning disability they were not for me I can only do technology unfortunately, I'm working on certificates, but I got fired from both trades when I was giving it my all as an apprentice.
If you want to have a grand wedding (which it sounds like you do), it looks like your only option is to wait, pay of your debts, and work on saving. Good luck!
Do you want her to feel like a princess for one day or every day? Relax and listen to her. She says she likes the elopement idea so do it. You’re in your head with the dream you want to give instead of the reality that is. I guarantee that she’d say she’d rather a good marriage than a great wedding. She had a crappy marriage already.
5k could pay down half their debt. It’s also 1/8 of his annual income. It’s really not a good idea for them either
Have you looked into local parks? I'm not sure where in Ohio you are, but, if you're near Cleveland, you can rent a pavilion in the Metroparks for $300 for a weekend date. Many of the pavilions include electricity, fireplaces, etc. They also include picnic tables and grills (though I'd suggest saving money by not serving substantial food). If you held the wedding outside of a traditional meal time (say, 2:00 - 4:30), you could get away with cake, non-alcoholic drinks, and snacks. A Costco 1/2 sheet cake is about $35 and can feed about 50 people. Sheet cakes from Walmart are priced similarly. Grab some big bags of chips and pretzels ($15), bottled water (Costco and Walmart have 40 packs for $5-$6, so let's say $15 total to make sure there's enough for everyone), and spend $150 combined on vegetables (carrots, cucumbers, and bell peppers are usually cheap) and fruit (melon tends to get you a good bang for your buck), and you have almost everything you need for a short reception for about $500, including the cost of pavilion rental. You might be able to rent a pavilion elsewhere for much cheaper. In a park, you won't need many decorations, because nature will provide the decoration, and you can pick up a bouquet of flowers from Walmart or Trader Joe's the morning of the wedding for $25. You can always throw a blowout anniversary party in ten years if/when you're in a better place financially.
The previous suggestions are all great— I want to also jump in and say that if you want catering, etc., a party at an event center isn’t going to be substantially cheaper than a wedding itself. A party still requires a rental feed for the space, per price head for catering, decorations, etc. The reception is definitely the more expensive of the two parts.
The Ohio state Capitol building is gorgeous and you can have your wedding there for free. It is your first amendment right to assemble. You just need to let them know you want to do it. There are videos on their website showing g you the building and how to arrange it.
What does she want? That’s really what this comes down to. Some people love the weddings with a big family, some people truly just want a small elopement. Ask her what she wants. You can do a backyard wedding with family or a small church (or even a local park) if that’s what you both want, and it will keep the costs down. An elopement can also be wonderful. This is what we did and it was very cheap and simply beautiful. But this is your wedding and both of you need to decide who needs to be there and what you want.
My brother married his wife under similar circumstances. They lived at home with parents separated for the first 3 years of marriage, put the grind in and now 10 years later they are homeowners with 2 kids. Their only debt is their mortgage. It sounds to me like you two are doing your best to come out on top. You still deserve a nice wedding day even if it’s not an expensive one. That said, it should definitely not be an expensive one. My brother got married at the local court and then afterward we had a luncheon at a restaurant for about 15 people. We went out that night to the bars with all our friends as a “dance reception”. My SIL rented her dress from rent the runway, my brother wore a suit he already owned. I made her bouquet, she went to the salon and got a blowout and then did her own makeup. They baked their own wedding cake. No photographer, just our digital cameras (it was 10 years ago lol) and phones. For their 10th anniversary they are finally having professional family photos done. So it was very small, as much renting/DIY/pre-owned as possible, and it was still a beautiful day. Congrats and good luck!
I would suggest DIY whatever you can, trimming the guest list as much as you can, like an intimate wedding of 25 to 50 people maybe, and finding a reasonably priced venue and dress. The dress and the venue/food for guests are the biggest ticket items, so if those are reasonable that cuts your cost a ton automatically. You can also look at things like Thursday night, Sundays or Sat mornings for the wedding event time, those less popular times usually have discounted pricing. You can still have a great wedding and honeymoon and not break the bank, good luck to you!👍✅
First of all kudos to you for wanting to create a significant, meaningful day within your budget! My FH and I are doing something very similar to what you’re thinking about - eloping at the courthouse, with a family reception to follow. We’re hiring a photographer and videographer for the ceremony, and we’re live streaming it for our immediate families. We plan to show the full video at our reception. Some splurge-y but reasonable ideas to make your fiancée/yourself feel special on the day of, if you decide to elope: Rent a cool, sporty/luxurious/fun car from Turo for the day, to use as a “getaway car” and make for some fun pictures. I’m looking in my area, a HCOL, and finding all sorts of sports and luxury vehicles for less than $100/day, as an example. Get the best hotel room you can afford, just for the night. Go all out: ask the concierge to help you arrange for champagne, a mini cake, and some late night snacks in the room. They’re usually happy to accept an Instacart delivery and place it in your room. If you tell them it’s your wedding night sometimes they’ll add other cute/fancy touches! Order in advance a flower drying kit (a box with silica sand) so that she can dry her bouquet. This can later be turned into lots of pretty mementos such as resin sculptures, shadowboxes etc so she’ll always have that keepsake. Make sure your photographer gets a few photos of just her - she’ll feel extra special and princessesy! Congrats and best wishes!
"The issue that arrives is that with our elopement option she won't get the traditional wedding feeling, the cheesy games, the catering, seeing the whole family, the tradition." You can make her feel like an absolutely fairytale princess in a private elopment if the "princess feeling and romance" are more important than the cheesy games with all the people. Once you are in better finances, you can organize a 1y, 3y, 5y or a 10y anniversary party and wine and dine your people then. Plan a magical elopment day/weekend for just the two of you: hotel room, surprise her with a little present or her favorite food in the morning, drop her off at the hair & makeup, do the ceremony, make a big speech about love and her beauty etc, play heart-breakingly beautiful music in the woods, have a photographer capture the ceremony and to do a photoshoot after. Whisk her away to a romantic sunset picnic - bring the photographer. Carry her over the threshold to the hotel room where the employees have decorated it for you with rose petals and chocolates and champagne and the cheesiest towel swans they can muster. Have Bridgerton sex with long seductive slow-mo undressing by the fireplace. Real life romance movie montage. As long as she doesn't get the dress dirty in the forest, she can sell it afterwards. If she is happy with a more fairy-princess look (which would go dreamily with a forest elopment), she can find gorgeous white summer dresses or floral dresses for couple hundreds. Trust me, give her all the bells and whistles privately and she won't want to share you or your special day with anyone. And it will be way cheaper than hosting a hundred people somewhere for hours and hours of food, alcohol, music, decor etc.