I paid for my own wedding. My wife took the first pass at planning it. We priced out her dream wedding. It was close to $35k. My wife, bless her heart, hates spending money, so it didn’t take much to convince her to dial back expectations.

We started googling for ‘state park weddings’ and found a great park an hour outside of town on the waterfront with a barn. It cost us $500 to book it for the day.

We tracked down the wedding planner from one of the weddings there on instagram. She had only done the one wedding for her friend and didn’t know if she wanted to do it for a living. She offered to do it for us for almost nothing. She completely blew us away, making handmade decorations, and even emceeing for us. We ended up giving her a 100% tip and still feel like we underpaid. We didn’t get a DJ, we just used Spotify. We hired a photography student that was a friend of a friend to do the pictures. We got a roadside bbq joint to cater. I think we spent $3500 for everything including the wedding dress and photographer.

We used the savings to do an around the world trip for our honeymoon. I think after the wedding and honeymoon we ended up with like $2000 of debt on our credit card.

So you can definitely do a low budget wedding that’s still beautiful if you try.