blonde poker forum

Hi blonde!

Just wondering if any members have had a wedding recently (last 5-10 years) and spending like £5k+ (probably to a maximum of £30k) and wouldn't mind if I pick their brains.

I'm looking to find out basically two things.

What you spent and what you got for your money?

Any help would be muchly apprecieated while I carry out market research!

Thanks

Callum

is that inclusive of everything? ie dresses and transport as well as the meal and reception?

Not dresses, stag dos, hen dos but

Venue, food, accommodation etc

Are you looking to do church/ registry office and then a reception venue......or a venue that will do everything?

We worked out the numbers who we wanted and then visited a few places .Venues tend to give an all inclusive price , so if you know the numbers you can budget accordingly.
Aim high end, work backwards and negotiate....... ;)

A touch more than 10 years ago, but we took this joint over exclusively for an entire weekend for about £10k including rooms, breakfast and the wedding meals I seem to recall.

http://www.langdalechase.co.uk

£5k is expensive, £30k is a ridiculous amount.

My own wedding came in at c£250 ( admittedly it was 1977) but more recently my daughter's wedding at a good Country House Hotel, 80+ guests, the best roast beef I've eaten in the UK, a barbecue supper, disco, the works came in at less than £3k. The venue staff were brilliant and the day passed off wonderfully well.

So many things you can do with the money you don't blow on a big wedding. Take the holiday of a lifetime for your honeymoon; put it into the house or furniture; tuck it away towards the costs of children; the list is pretty long.

The average for a wedding is way in excess of £5k, more like £15k these days. 'Expensive' is all relative.

under 3k???

david thats amazingly good value, how many took the roast beef dinner?
even a bbq for 80 people you would be lucky to get that put on for less that £10 per head

average wedding cost last year of a wedding in the UK was nearer 20k

Everything save says is true for me too, including the year I got married and the cost of daughter's weddings. (Two of my girls got married within a month of each other)

Not sure how much weddings cost nowadays but spend as much as you want and feel comfortable spending, whether on the cheapside or expensive. I get what people say about spending the money on honeymoon etc. but surely some people get pleasure out of a big/expensive weddings.

Yup this, cheap or expensive is all relative to what you want for the day and how much cash you are willing/able to spend. I know people that have spent 500 quid and got what they wanted and the same for people who spent £40k.

The only thing I've noticed, is the more expensive they are, the more disapproving looks tend to get thrown about in the evening ;D

yeah totally this i have had friends get married speding fortunes and those spending not much more than a night out on the town and found just as many people raving about the one done on a shoestring budget as on the ones spending a fortune. but i have found more people griping about the one where money is no object and very few people complain about the budget wedding

more important than a show piece day is making sure you dont ruin your future married life by raking up a debt

Good points, well made. Each to their own and all that.

Just a point, the £20k figure seems to come from a wedding planners association. As well as being inflated by the cost of hiring a wedding planner I'm guessing it also has a strong London bias.

I would guess most weddings are regional in small venues,  I'd expect the average overall to probably be closer to £3 - 5k

Cheers for the comments so far. Very similar to what I have had elsewhere.

I know there are a lot of people that have "cheap" weddings and spend less than £1k. I have no issues with that its just not the market I am aiming at with this business plan.

I was amazed when a few friends were spending £10k+ and i know what kind of money they earn and it did not make sense to me but hey ho they dont understand why I want to go to Vegas! Each to there own i suppose.

Im looking at a venue to do accommodation and the actually wedding/do itself. Nothing new I know but i remember hearing in the early days of business there are two ways to make money. Come up with a new idea, or take someone else's idea and do it better than them!

I have seen that wedding planners alone charge 10-15% of the total cost of the wedding with a minimum of say £1.5k never mind food/accommodation.

We are looking to accommodate between 20-30, and be able to host a party for 50-150.

Ask anyone who has tried to book a wedding in nicer hotel/venue about how easy it is to get a date, hat tells you the demand for people willing to spend a lot mate. There are tons of people willing to spend a lump, bank of mum and dad and all that.

Im ringing all the venues near where we are looking today to see there availability. That should give me a good indication, on the whole i think one of the nearby venues is better but not "done as well" as I would want to. The other venue is not as nice and the advertising is not as good, therefore if they are busy it will be a good indication.

Blondes very own Franck :)

(http://www.snakkle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/father-of-the-bride-martin-short-GC.jpg)

We spent about 8k if I recall correctly and had a fairly small wedding (about 50 guests) from what I have seen and unless you really scrimp and save I think it would be fairly hard to come in under 5k these days for a wedding of that size.

:D I always thought weddings would cost 59k+, naive I guess!

Is this what your been telling the gf? Carnot do it yet, I'll have to win 3 Sundays in a row to recoup that :p

Cheers for all the comments so far hopefully be able to post a positive update in the not to distant future!

That sounds pretty much spot on.

I'm getting married (again) next June. We're getting married in Dovedale on the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border, and the whole do is going to be outside. Obviously, you can't bank on the British weather giving you a rain-free day, so we looked at hiring a marquee. Hiring a marquee to fit 80+ guests isn't cheap. You're talking a few grand. Ridiculous money. So instead we've bought a special "stretch-tent" (for a similar cost to hiring one) that we plan to sell after the wedding and recoup the cost of that.

We're not paying for a church or anything, as we're having a humanist ceremony in the grounds, but we still have to get legally married at a registry office, and that itself costs a few hundred quid.

We're doing something quite different with the food and drink for the wedding, but that can easily cost a fair whack, especially if you're at a posh venue.

A decent photographer can cost well over a grand, same for a videographer. A disco will cost you a few hundred, and if you want a live band, that can cost a chunk as well.

It can easily add up, and that's even if you keep things relatively simple. For a small and modest wedding, I think you're looking at £3k, but if you have forty plus guests and you start adding on "extras", I reckon that a "typical" wedding would be in the region of £10k.