Posted by:
laxy
(
)
Date: June 07, 2015 01:46AM
This is off topic but I'm looking for advice. My boyfriend and I will be getting married next summer (not in the temple! woohoo!) and we want to keep it as cheap as humanly possible. In fact, I'm seriously considering just doing a city hall wedding. We were considering doing a reception, but we want to keep it as cheap as humanly possible....definitely under $1,000 but in my ideal world it would be under $500.
I would honestly be okay with skipping a reception, but we do want gifts/money for our honeymoon and I feel that people would be less inclined to give either money or gifts if we didn't have a reception to "pay them back". Maybe I'm wrong in assuming this is how people think but it's what I'm expecting.
Our biggest priority is the honeymoon - we want to take a 7-day cruise to Alaska. It would involve cruise tickets, and plane tickets, and other expenses such as lodging/souvenirs/excursions. This could easy be at least $2,500. So we would really appreciate help with a "honeyfund".
I guess my question to you all is, since a lot of you seem to be married, how important was your wedding? Did you do a reception and wish you hadn't and/or wished you had done something different?
We aren't expecting help monetarily from either of our families, and we're poor college kids. I don't think it's the family's responsibility...it's not their wedding. But I don't know if we could do it all completely alone and be able to do both a reception and honeymoon full-out. Opinions? What should we focus on? Is a reception necessary? Thanks!
EDIT (from below):
I want to make something clear though: I never said that we are expecting others to finance our wedding and honeymoon. Yes, we have thought about doing a "honeyfund" for some extra money on the trip instead of doing physical gifts, but as I stated in the original post, it is our wedding and we plan on paying for it. I don't like getting offended but I never said "everyone should pay for our stuff". It might be a nice compliment instead of physical gifts (and it's not abnormal - there is an entire site dedicated to "honeyfunds") but we do not expect it.
We expect that we will have a few thousand dollars to play with, without help from anyone. We also will have been living together for a year when we get married so we're not going in to marriage clueless....I know that's the Mormon way but we're both very smart, responsible people who talk about anything and everything related to changes after we marry. We are not clueless, like many Mormon newlyweds.
Once again, I don't mean to take offense but I do want to make some things clear. We're not looking at going in to extreme debt, we've talked in depth about finances before and after we officially get married, we don't expect people to shower us with gifts (but still want to decide how to approach the topic as I'm sure SOME people will want to), etc.
By the above statement "But I don't know if we could do it all completely alone and be able to do both a reception and honeymoon full-out", I simply am saying that we probably WON'T be able to do both aspects full-out on our own, so we probably WON'T. That's why I'm saying we want to go very mild on the wedding. Not saying we want others to finance us.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2015 11:58AM by laxy.