We Married Under $2,500 and We Couldn’t Be Happier. Here’s why.

The most unexpected lessons of marrying on a tight budget

Published in

Moments

9 min readApr 10, 2020

The beautiful bride as the maids of honor rush with last-minute preparations. Photo by Richard Gomez.

The bride is running late. Our guests are sitting on the church’s benches, gathered in groups and chatting casually. I go around, spreading out hugs and kisses, welcoming everyone to our wedding and asking everyone to stay put. The beautiful bride will arrive any minute now.

This is not what we have planned.

Like any other engaged couple, we have had long and meaningful conversations about our wedding, what it means to us and how to make it special. The way we see it, our wedding should be a symbol of our union and we should feel free to make it our own.

Early on, we realize that thankfulness is a recurring theme in our conversations and we want that to show. So we do not want the ceremony to start with the guest waiting for the bride to grace them with her presence. Instead, we decide to be at the door by the time guests arrive, so we can welcome and thank them for being with us on this day.

Back to reality. Neither of us make it in time to welcome our guests as they arrive. By the time I arrive, every single one of them is already inside the church. By the time the bride arrives, I have made a couple of rounds, the priest has asked more than once if the bride is coming and I am waiting nervously by the entrance. The bridesmaids are diligently waiting by the entrance too, ready to march in to help the bride with the last touches as soon as she steps out of the car.

The wedding has not even started and we have already gone off script.

It is only the beginning. Through the evening, we keep derailing from the plan. My mom seems to be in a particularly bad mood. I try to make her feel comfortable, but I can only get her to mumble monosyllables. Father Carlos inadvertently changes the order we agreed for the ceremony. The restaurant arranges a presidential table and assigned seating even though we have made the point that we want a roaming dinner.

The most comical of our wrong turns was when I was reciting my vows and one of the guests shouted: “We can’t hear a thing!”. I thought of walking to the stand to use the priest’s microphone, but before I could move, someone put in my hands a tacky wireless mic with a horrible echo-y sound.

A tacky wireless mic with a horrible echo-y sound, the bride and the groom. Photo by Richard Gomez.

To be honest, anyone could have predicted that our wedding would be governed by improvisation. After all, it was prepared in only three months with a budget of $2,500.

Why we decided to get married on a tight budget

Nobody dreams of a cheapskate wedding and neither did we, but circumstance drove us down that path.

There was a job offer across the Atlantic. This offer tackled my long-held desire to live and work abroad and, economically, it made sense. However, it meant that we would face moving costs and that my wife would remain jobless for around six months, while she obtained a working permit and found a job.

Hence, the tight budget.

I suppose there are lots of ways we could have gone about it. I could have made the move on my own and come back a year later to get “properly married” or “do a real wedding”, as some of my acquaintances put it. We could have emptied our savings. We could have taken up a loan. We could have asked our families to chip in.

There were millions of ways to handle this, but for all our wedding talks, we barely spent time discussing budget. We had absolutely no intention of burning our savings, getting in debt or passing the economic burden onto our families.

“How much?” She asked. “Surely, this will take some negotiation” —I thought—, so I burped a ridiculously low amount. “I’d try to do it under $2,500”, I said.

Surely, she would laugh at me, right? But, instead, we asked: “Does that include the honeymoon?”. I did not think it would, but challenge accepted. “Yes, do you think we can make it?”. “Okay” — she said calmly.

That was it. It was that simple. If you asked us then why we decided on such a tight budget, we could only give you a few reasons, all economical:

We were about to move to another country and preferred to spend the money on setting camp there
We work hard to save for the future and for emergencies, so we did not want to spend a significant percentage of our savings on the wedding
We did not think it was fair to burden our families with the cost of our wedding
We have a high aversion to debt, so that was always out of the question

A moment of clarity

At a deeper level, we suspected that throwing more money into the wedding would not necessarily make it more special. Little by little, that suspicion was confirmed as the wedding day got closer.

Looking back, we have learned that marrying on a tight budget comes with benefits that surpass by far the obvious goal of saving money. We married on a small budget for economic reasons, but now we encourage our friends to do the same for many other reasons.

There was a particular moment of clarity 2 weeks into planning. We did not even have a date yet, but due to my commitment to my new employer, we had a very small window of options. It was April 4th and I had to show to my new job, 5,000 miles away, on July 16. If we wanted to have any kind of honeymoon, we had to get married in the first few days of July at the latest.

We had just been able to present all the required documents and, after the most stressful two weeks of my life, we finally felt relieved that all our papers would be in line to get married by our deadline. At that point, we let go of all our stress. Sure, we had not figured out any of the details, but it was no longer a question of whether we would be able to make it. From this moment on, it was simply a matter of making choices.

That day, we were having dinner with a couple of friends who coincidentally were also engaged. They had been engaged longer than our mere two weeks and they would not tie the knot for a few months after our wedding.

This made for a strange setting. Even though my fiancé and I were getting married in three months, we were behind them in terms of planning.

During dinner, our friends kept asking questions. “When is the wedding?”. I was happy to report that we had narrowed it down to a very small window of options, but they expected a precise date. Year. Month. Day.

“Where is the ceremony”. “We were hoping Mae’s church will be available” —I said—, “but if it isn’t, whatever church we can find will do”.

“Well… do you have a wedding dress?” No... “Have you tried any dress on? Not so far… What type of dress do you have in mind?” No idea.

The more we talked, the more anxious our friends were getting. We realized that they were so stressed about their big wedding that they could not understand our serenity.

Our wedding vows. Photo by Richard Gomez.

Why marry on a tight budget: unexpected lessons

That dinner opened our eyes and was a confirmation that marrying small was the best decision we could have ever made. We realized that it is easy for fiancés to lose sight of what matters. You get your head so far down the hole that the celebration starts being more important than the love you are celebrating.

I understand that marrying on such a small budget may not be for everyone, but I hope that our learnings can help other couples navigate through the stress of planning a wedding.

We married cheaply. We still had the time of our lives, we celebrated with our loved ones and, looking back, we would not change a thing. Not only that, but we discovered that marrying on a budget has surprising benefits.

Obviously, a small budget makes economic sense

When you marry on a small budget, you walk out of the wedding free of debt, with your savings practically intact and better prepared to build your life as a married couple.

You may have heard people say that spending large sums of money on a wedding is OK because it is an investment. In fact, this is a typical argument often used to rationalize any kind of absurd spending, but it is almost always false and it certainly is in the case of weddings.

Most importantly, it keeps you focused on what matters

A small budget will make you prioritize and focus on what really matters. When you discard services that you cannot afford with your budget, you are actually making a distinction between what matters and what does not. The more items you cross off your list, the more you focus on what really matters.

It keeps stress at bay

By discarding the unimportant, you are also eliminating sources of stress.

Stress can quickly add up from tiny details. By accepting a small budget, you are also coming to terms with the possibility that not everything will be perfect. So there is no reason to panic if things do not go as planned.

A small budget also acts as a shield against external pressures

Engaged couples can quickly feel like they have become an instrument to others’ wishes. Our culture and our environment conjure up a demanding set of expectations on what your wedding is supposed to look like. Then there are the very specific demands that inevitably come from your families.

A small budget can often be used as a shield against those external pressures. Your mother wants you to invite a distant cousin you have not seen in 20 years? Sorry. No can do. Budget is tight.

It fuels creativity

“Obstacles boost brainpower” and a tight budget is a fruitful obstacle.

I thought marrying on a budget would be about making sacrifices, but it pushed us to come up with our own ideas, our own interpretations on how to make a wedding special. It is natural to think that you can only make your wedding special by throwing money in, but you can get at least as much done with a little creativity.

It shows that you are marrying for the right reasons

If you were hoping to hide the fact that you are on a tight budget, sorry; when the whole wedding costs less than $2,500, it shows. But look at it this way: who is going to question your motives? Clearly, it must be love.

It allows all guests to attend

An often overlooked issue is that attending a wedding can be expensive and inconvenient for guests. They may feel obligated to get you a present and to wear new expensive clothes. Not to mention the travel expenses some of your guests will inevitably incur.

By being open about your small budget, you are also sending a clear message: this day is about celebrating your union with your loved ones. If the bride and the groom are keeping costs low, surely they don’t expect guests to break open their piggy banks.

It makes room for spending quality time with all your guests

On big weddings, the couple barely gets the chance to enjoy the food or spend time with their guests. They are scheduled to make an appearance here, pose for a picture there, now pose for another picture... They do the rounds and get to spend about 3 minutes per table.

A positive outcome of cutting back on extras is that you leave more time to roam around and mingle. At our wedding, we had plenty of time to spend with our loved ones without other responsibilities than enjoying their company.