My husband and I spent about $5,000 on a wedding and dinner reception for over 100 people — and much of our honeymoon expenses, too! I even bought a brand new big fluffy white dress (which was almost a grand).

If you’re curious, some of my frugal weddings tips are at: http://www.fruwiki.com/index.php?title=Weddings

I’m not phased by wedding expenses, but the CRAZIEST thing I can think of is buying a house with your boyfriend. I practically begged a girlfriend not to do it–it really hurt our friendship. He just left one night. She can’t even find him to sell the thing.

And 175 does seem small when you have families as big as my fiance’s and mine. All in the perspective.

Our friends were all friends longer than 10 years to be invited. I didn’t even really invite college friends and neither did DH. They had to be really old friends to garner an invite.

We had tons of friends from grad school and undergrad that were angling for an invite. Easily we could have added 50 people we worked with, but we chose to just cut it.

So when asked we said 10 years was the minimum for friendship. And the rest was family. My BFF has been for 25 years, my other bridesmaid about 12 years. DH’s BFF for 20 years and the groomsman his brother.

So this way people we knew only a couple of years and we were invited to their wedding, we just explained it was “small” and intimate.

We haven’t talked costs yet since it’s not that near in the future, but we’d like to have it at a nicer place since it’ll be small. Having it small means we don’t need to cut corners as much to save either – at least that’s the plan now. Another big issue is that a lot of people will be traveling to come so we’d want to make it worth their while too.

It was pretty much only family we each had about 6 friends invited. The very close and personal friends.

And our wedding reception was about $5k. Everything for our wedding including travel, honeymoon, photographer, etc was $15k.

It was a lot. But like I said it’s a matter of perspective. People think they are having “small” weddings of 100+ people. I think under 50 (we were close) is a small wedding. Anything above is mid-size, definitely over 100 is mid-size. And above 200 people is large.

But to many it’s not. And this applies to money too. $10k wedding is expensive to some and exorbitant to others. But to others $100k weddings are a minimum.