Hello World,

As you know (if you’ve been reading this blog), I got engaged on Christmas Eve 2012! For roughly two months after R.’s proposal, I was in a state of joy and almost disbelief. While our relationship seemed to be heading in that direction almost from the very start, I still found it hard to believe that after all of the time (years) I prayed for God to send the right man to me, he had arrived finally and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me…

Once I announced our engagement to friends, family, etc., everyone kept asking me whenis the date of our wedding. I had no answer for them. I was still trying to mentally adjust to being engaged let alone set the actual wedding date. This went on for January and February, and then all of a sudden, it occurred to me. If I truly did want to get married, I better start thinking of a planning a wedding. After consulting with R., we decided that a summer wedding would be nice. So I got to planning…

My Mom and Dad on their wedding day…

A few years ago with the help of a financial counselor, I revolutionized my finances and began aggressively budgeting and saving. Since then, I have become a certified cheapskate and proud of it. One of my favorite mottoes is “It it’s free, it’s for me.” So imagine my shock when I discovered the average wedding costs $25,656, according to theweddingreport.com!!! I mean according to the latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the yearly median family household income is $62,273. So a wedding for many Americans costs almost half of their yearly salary! Am I the only one that thinks this is crazy at best and downright irresponsible at worst?! And then when you factor in that the divorce rate is between 40 and 50 percent, many couples are just wasting money…In fact, I’ve heard that some couples are getting divorced so quickly that they are still paying off wedding expenses when they get divorced! How crazy is that? I’m not getting married to get divorced, but trust and believe that I’m planning a bargain basement wedding! Mama didn’t raise no fool! (Sidebar: Do you know the average cost of a wedding in 1945 was about $2,000? That’s what I’m talking about!)

So if you are thinking of getting married and having a decent wedding, let me just give you a few of the stats so that you can plan accordingly…These figures are based on a wedding of about 136 guests, which is the average amount of people that are invited to a wedding…

I have found that the greatest wedding expense is the cost of the reception…

The reception location costs $3,226, and the average cost for reception food is $4,757. If you want to serve liquor which you very well may need after adding up the costs, you will need to fork over $2,456 for reception bar service…

And if you want to read to see the rest of the numbers, please go to theweddingreport.com.

Since I am a certified cheapskate, I have become obsessed with cutting down the costs of planning a wedding. My goal is to have a tasteful wedding without going into a debt and allocating the majority of our wedding/marriage money for an off-the-chain honeymoon…

So I have a couple of questions for you today…

How much do you spend on your wedding/honeymoon?

Was it worth the costs?

And if you are a certified cheapskate like me, please share your tips on how to trim wedding costs short of getting married at the courthouse!

Any thoughts?

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