Love on a Shoestring: Our $150 Wedding

You might call me a minimalist, or just plain cheap, but when I set out to plan my recent wedding I didn't want anything elaborate. My husband-to-be, Richard, agreed, although he did harbor a wish for a Vegas drive-through wedding with an Elvis impersonator as our witness.

We both love nature and simplicity, so we could have driven 65 miles south to Colorado and married, just the two of us, in the mountains, with a license that said parties to the marriage in the space provided for the wedding officiant. No minister, no witnesses necessary. If we'd done that, we could have had a $50 wedding. But we wanted, as Richard said, "someone there to say a few inspiring words." So we decided to splurge.

Splurging, of course, is relative. The average U.S. wedding now costs more than $27,000. Granted, I have been out of school for a while, but $27,000 is more than I spent on my entire college education, including two graduate degrees.

How has a nearly $30,000 price tag become acceptable for a one-day event? It seems to me the money could be far better spent for a down payment on a house, a few years' tuition at a state university or a spiffy new hybrid with some left over for gas.

To place it in a larger context, what might $30,000 mean to a school or medical clinic on the Wind River Indian Reservation or in the Mississippi Delta? What would it mean to a family living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans?

Multiplying the average wedding's cost by the nearly 2.3 million weddings estimated to occur in the United States this year means that Americans will spend about $64 billion on weddings. Compare this figure with the gross domestic product of Lithuania ($49 billion), Nepal ($40 billion), Luxembourg ($31 billion) or Iceland ($11 billion).