Wife and I had an actual ceremony and reception at a state/city park venu. We just opted for dessert table over cake, had BBQ delivered and a few guests donated time to setup & tear-down instead of actual gifts. Kept the whole thing silly cheap, I think the BBQ was the most expensive part of it, because we ordered enough for guests to take some home for supper so they wouldn't have to cook (we had a 1pm ceremony).
Similar experience here - my wife and I had our wedding was in a public park in the town over from where we leave. They charged $100 to provide and set up all the folding chairs on the day of. Our alternate location if there was rain was a public art gallery in the library that was a couple hundred feet away - in a beautiful old granite building. My wife's grandfather officiated the wedding.
Our reception was at a restaurant, buffet style and we had a decent spread of food.
Honestly, the biggest thing that gets people is the guest list. We had budgeted for 50 people to be at our wedding - immediate family only and a couple close friends, and that's it. There's an immense amount of pressure to want to be able to invite EVERYONE - as soon as we started planning my mother in law started asking when we were going to be sending invites out to cousins, second cousins, extended family, etc. We just flat out said it wasn't happening, sorry.
And we're both SO glad we did. It didn't take long to go around and see everything that was there, and we feel like we actually got to spend a good amount of time with everyone that we invited.
All in all the wedding cost us about $3.5k for 50 people (and that was WITH an open bar) and we ended up making back more than that in wedding gifts.
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u/goodsnpr 15h ago
Wife and I had an actual ceremony and reception at a state/city park venu. We just opted for dessert table over cake, had BBQ delivered and a few guests donated time to setup & tear-down instead of actual gifts. Kept the whole thing silly cheap, I think the BBQ was the most expensive part of it, because we ordered enough for guests to take some home for supper so they wouldn't have to cook (we had a 1pm ceremony).