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Vader and I have just returned from the beautiful wedding of two of my great friends, and we had an awesome time. It's fueled a lot of talk in the past few days of what we'd like our wedding to look like, which has brought us to even more awareness of cost.

Weddings are expensive. Throwing them is expensive. Going to them is expensive. Being in them is expensive. When I first learned the average American spends $27,000 on a wedding I scoffed. "Pshaw," I said, "I can do it for WAY less. I'll just skip all the fancy extras and it will be very affordable."

As it turns out, that $27,000 figure does not come from things like hiring a calligrapher, working with a wedding planner, or serving palate-cleansing sorbet between courses. It comes from the fact that food, service, and rentals cost so much, in addition to the fact that anything "bridal" costs 200% more than the non-bridal variety.

There are a few "luxuries" (the word is used very loosely here) that we are committed to. We want the wedding inside, because rain plans are generally sub-par and the idea of waving flies off my food is disgusting. We want the wedding catered, because coordinating the rental and setup of food, tables, chairs, etc. can cost more than everything done at once. Finally, we want to have everything ready to go (with the help of the caterers) before the wedding so our family and friends can enjoy themselves without also committing to days of manual labor.

Because we're paying for the wedding mostly ourselves, Vader and I need to be frugal with wedding expenses where we can. I've spent a lot of time over the past year and a half searching wedding forums for mention of affordable vendors, DIY projects that actually save money, and daily deals related to wedding needs. It meant a lot of weeding through pages of forums and reading reviews of each suggested vendor, but it also means our photography will cost about 1/3 to 1/5 of traditional wedding photography packages and our invitations will not cost more than my dress.

We understand that the decisions we've made about the wedding will make it more expensive than others, and that there are ways we could have spent less. We could have had a backyard wedding, or a Sunday brunch wedding, or we could have eloped. None of these seemed like us, however, so we're going ahead with the Saturday evening indoor wedding. The frugality we have employed thus far and will continue to use should help us stay under that $27k figure, though nowhere near as far below as I had originally hoped.

Vader and I are thankfully similarly committed to wedding spending. We want to have a good time and we want our loved ones to have a good time. Yet, our life together will continue after the wedding and we would very much like to not blow our (admittedly brief) life's savings on a big party*. Someday not TOO long after the wedding we'll want to buy a house and start a family, all of which appropriately costs much more than a wedding. Though likely years away, our goal is that next August we can hit the ground running toward our next enormous life expense. Oh, to be a kid again when money came from the tooth fairy and grown-ups had it all figured out.

*This reminded me of that Friends episode where Monica finds out how much money Chandler has and starts pushing to spend every penny of it on their wedding. Chandler continually refuses to blow it all on a party and Monica points out that if he continues to call their wedding a party he may not be invited. Look it up if you haven't seen it in a while!

At this point we have made many of the money decisions we'll have to make for the wedding, but will continue to extensively research more affordable options for our remaining choices. Our shared next goal is to work on minimizing the expense of attending our wedding (and associated shenanigans) for our overwhelmingly graduate student wedding party.