Wish Breakdown: Bride and Groom vs Guest

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in wedding botches, Wedding Ceremony, Wedding cliches, Wedding Reception, wedding traditions

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Some people feel that their weddings are a way to express themselves and in many ways “force” their views on others.  For example, a couple that is vegetarian or vegan may choose to not offer meat as a meal choice and, in the process, subject everyone at the wedding to their dietary practices whether their guests like it or not.  Likewise, someone who is not a sports fan is unlikely to check the sports calendar prior to scheduling a wedding.  I went to a wedding thrown on the opening weekend of college football.  The couple did not care for football or sports in general, something which is understandable.  However, just because someone is not interested in something such as football should not result in everyone at the wedding suffering.

After the ceremony, there was the expected awkward hour or two where strangers are expected to act as though they are interested in one another and to pretend that these awkward interactions are actually fun.  Since the reception was being held at a country club, there were televisions throughout the establishment, especially in the bar area.  They were all off.  When someone asked if a certain game could be turned on, the bartender stated that the couple had specifically requested that the televisions be left off.  This request was infuriating and unreasonable for several reasons.  This request assumed that everyone would be more interested in speaking with one another than watching a huge college football matchup.  This assumption could not have been more wrong since strangers almost never get excited to speak to one another.  Additionally, the request had no bearing on the couple since the couple was off engaging in picture taking while the televisions were being kept off.  They were not in the reception area and being ignored in favor of a big college football game; they weren’t even there!  Their request resulted in guests being annoyed for no true reason.

Eventually, a group of people, myself included, decided to take turns streaming the game through an app and put a phone on a table so that people could watch the game.  Shockingly (sarcasm fully intended), within minutes of the news spreading that someone was streaming a game, the table became the first to receive appetizers from the wait staff and collected quite a crowd of onlookers who clearly felt that watching a football game was more entertaining than the awkward small talk that always occurs during the downtime between the ceremony and the reception.

I can see the response to this post already.  It will be something along the lines of how it is “mean” to go against the wishes of the bride and groom on their wedding day.  However, there is a flipside to this argument: it is evil and unnecessary for a bride and groom to force people to adhere to their unreasonable and illogical demands such as demanding that a game not be shown when the bride and groom are not even in the area.  Regardless of the wishes of a bride and groom, a rivalry game or feature matchup will always be more interesting than engaging in small talk for two hours with random people.  Everyone has a phone; hoping that the wedding will magically become a sports-free zone for the duration of the wedding is unreasonable and is doomed to fail.  Ultimately, classic matchups like Alabama/LSU or Ohio State/Michigan were there before the couple getting married and will be there far after the couple divorces or passes away.  Trying to fight this tradition with a weak weapon such as asking that televisions be turned off is a losing battle that will only cause greater annoyance for all involved.

A little something to remember as college football bowl and playoff season nears and the NFL playoff picture takes shape.

 

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A Breakdown of the Absurd Cost of Wedding Dishes

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in Wedding Food, wedding vendors, Wedding Venue

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As wedding season approaches, the save-the-dates and the wedding invitations begin to trickle in.  As someone who is constantly working to find new and interesting things to write about in the relatively unchanging world of weddings, I like to investigate the venues that people choose for their weddings.  In doing so, I often uncover information about the cost of food and the venue itself that allow my wife and I to plan our gift accordingly.  A lot of wedding venues aren’t well known, especially if a wedding is taking place in a different state, and it is useful to know about the venue, its history, and things that are nearby.

For one invitation, the exact description of the food that was being offered was not on the invitation.  Instead of saying something specific such as “Chicken Parmesan,” the invitation only stated “Chicken,” a description that is almost too vague to be useful in any way outside of letting vegetarians know that the dish does not fit their dietary needs.  Wanting to know what I would be eating if I marked the nebulous “Chicken” selection, I obtained the menu of the wedding venue and began looking.  There were actually four different chicken dishes on the menu, a grilled version, a roasted version, a marsala version, and one that came with a lemon sauce.  All of the choices seemed pretty straight forward and simple.  And then I saw the prices.  For the roasted chicken, the cost was a touch over $130 while for the one with the lemon sauce, the cost was a touch under $130.  The other two dishes were in this same range.  This price seemed absurd for almost any dish, much less a chicken dish.

The following puts the approximately $130 dish into perspective:

According to this site, I could purchase 30 heirloom chickens, raise them, and then eat them for a cost that, if done properly, should come out to approximately $3.50 per pound.  This would require some work, however, $3.50 per pound isn’t that bad for chicken, especially chicken that was raised in a way which guaranteed no harmful chemicals or antibiotics were being used and allowed the chickens to run around the way they would in nature.  Based on the site’s figures, 76 pounds of chicken meat would be produced by the 30 heirloom chickens.  Grocery stores routinely sell chicken for somewhere between $0.99 per pound and $5.00 per pound, depending on a variety of factors, which makes the $3.50 per pound relatively reasonable.

With the information about what it would cost to raise chickens in a completely organic and cage-free manner, the approximately $130 per dish cost on the wedding menu becomes a lot more absurd.  First, even if the venue gave every guest a pound of organic chicken, or even a whole chicken, the difference between the actual cost of the chicken and the cost of the dish would still be immense.  In addition, the chicken dishes do not involve incredibly expensive ingredients that would cause the total cost of the dish to be high.  One of the selections on the menu was “Chicken alla Griglia.”  The preparation of the dish will vary slightly, however, the basic ingredients involved include lemon, garlic, oil, vinegar (rice or white wine), and various spices including rosemary, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper, and oregano, items that are most likely in the majority of well-stocked kitchens and are relatively easy and inexpensive to purchase.  This particular dish also came with seasonal vegetables, which, in general, aren’t very costly, or at least not costly enough to justify an approximately $130 per plate price.  Based on all of this information, it is abundantly evident that this particular wedding venue either has an incredibly wealthy clientele that doesn’t care about price (or is not observant enough to notice the price) or has somehow managed to outsmart all of its customers into thinking that a little bit of chicken and vegetables is actually worth approximately $130.

For those familiar with the food world, Chef Paul Bocuse is a living legend.  Some books will have covers that say “New York Times Bestseller”; his cookbooks say “Chef of the Century.”  I have been lucky enough to eat at his restaurant, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges.  If you were to go and have his “Menu Grande Tradition Classique,” a seven or eight course meal, depending on how you distinguish between the dessert portion, it would cost 260€ per person.  As of the publication of this post, 1 US Dollar is the equivalent of about .9€ with some variance depending on the day.  This conversion would mean that the cost of the meal would come out to be $288.88, approximately $290.  While this is a very pricey meal, it is taking place at the restaurant of a living legend who has had a 3 Michelin star restaurant for longer than many people have been alive.

When the cost of a multi-course meal at the restaurant of arguably the greatest living chef is considered, paying approximately $130 for a single chicken dish at a wedding seems even more absurd.  That single chicken dish is 45% of the cost of a seven or eight course meal at one of the top restaurants in the world.  The wedding venue will not be taking great care on each dish as tens or even hundreds of the same dish need to come out at the same time.  The techniques required to keep things warm and produce such large quantities of food to be served at once inherently work against quality.  These factors all contribute to the production of a glaring example of the incredible gluttony, greed, and audacity that some venues have when it comes to outrageous prices for what is almost always average food.

 

 

 

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Confirming a hypothesis: A wedding photographer is a waste of money

02 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by in Wedding photography/videography, wedding vendors

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My wife and I got married in early May of 2015.  Approximately a year later, we (actually, my wife did) go around to posting the pictures of Facebook.  Like many couples, we received the thumb drive with our pictures a few weeks after the wedding and took it to Walgreens to print out pictures of various sizes.  The post-wedding “positivity” combined with the fact that everything was being printed meant that I did not closely analyze the pictures.  The pictures were printed and promptly put into a box that resides either in the living room or our office, I honestly do not know its exact whereabouts.

With the rise of social media that has made taking pictures of anything and everything popular, there are many so called “photographers” running around.  I personally was not a fan of having a wedding photographer and felt that if enough pictures were taken and sent to us by friends and family, we would have enough of a supply to find a few good pictures.  Essentially it was the theory of even a broken clock is right twice a day.  However, weddings only happen once and everyone said that we “have to” get a wedding photographer.  I was outmanned and, not wanting to cause a fuss over something like a wedding photographer when there were potential larger battles to fight such as the wedding venue, I relented.

The photographer we ultimately got was recommended by a few people we knew who claimed that he was a good photographer.  As a generally skeptical person, I looked at his photos and they were fine, nothing special.  They did the job, but I did not feel that they were amazing works of art.  They most certainly did not justify his price.  They were basically the types of pictures that someone would obtain if they took a lot of shots.  We met with this photographer at Starbucks and worked out a deal.  Based on our two meetings with him at Starbucks, he is a man who likes to use venues such as Starbucks for business transactions while refusing to patronize them.  Personally, I felt that this was the mark of someone with low character, but, again, not wanting to cause a lot of chaos over something relatively small, I noted this trait and kept quiet.

Fast forward to late March of 2016 and the photos are posted on Facebook by my wife.  I hadn’t seen or looked at the photos since we printed them a few weeks after the wedding and quickly flipped through the prints to make sure everything came out okay.  After posting them, she asked if I wanted to see them and we looked at them together.  While the pictures did bring back good memories, it was amazing what the passage of time did for how I was able to view the pictures objectively.  She had done a bulk upload without necessarily reviewing each image closely.  Some of the files were pictures that were taken by friends and family.  But the majority were not.  As we flipped through, comments were made about how certain pictures were bad.  Far too many of them were the images taken by our wedding photographer.  So many things were out of focus that shouldn’t have been, people weren’t centered, objects were cut off awkwardly, essentially, the pictures weren’t that nice.  I could have sent my mom, a woman who knows the fundamentals of photography and can perform the most basic of operations with a digital camera, armed her with the largest SD card I could find and some extra batteries, and told her to run around taking as many pictures of anything and everything, and I am confident that her efforts would have resulted in a handful of nice, frame‑and‑hang‑on-the-wall images that we got from the allegedly “professional” photographer who charged us 4 figures.

The experience was bittersweet.  Looking at the pictures was a quick, fun trip down memory lane.  Looking at the pictures and seeing all sorts of basic botches was upsetting for several reasons.  First, if a picture was bad, it should not have been put onto the final thumb drive that was given to us, the paying customer.  I saw our photographer take a picture, look down for several sections to see the picture preview, and then take another picture many times throughout the night.  As a professional, I expected him to be able to see if the picture was obviously terrible and delete it.  To give him the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that he had deleted many bad pictures and what we received were his “best” efforts.  If this second scenario is true, it says very little for him as a wedding photographer and even less for the respect he feels for his customers as he clearly feels that presenting sloppy work to his clients is acceptable.

I am sure that many wedding photographers will say that we simply lucked our way into a bad wedding photographer.  They may be right.  I would argue that the wedding photographer we had the misfortune of hiring is symptomatic of the entire wedding photography industry and possibly the wedding industry as a whole.  They overstate their skills, charge obscene amounts, and then under deliver hoping that they will never be called on it by people who receive their disappointing products as happy newlyweds.  It is the ultimate in too little, too late.

We hired our particular wedding photographer because he came recommended by several people.  I don’t blame those who recommended him.  They probably looked at the few nice pictures that they had from their wedding and thought that he did a fine job, in the process ignoring all the terrible pictures that they received with the handful of nice ones.  Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations for the wedding photographer.  Perhaps photographers routinely only “hit” on only a small percentage of their photos and have a lot of duds and I had an unrealistic expectation of what to expect for a person who charged exorbitantly to give up a random Friday evening to run around pretending to be a quality photography professional.  However, what I do know is that my original hypothesis that wedding photographers are an enormous waste of money was correct.  So for all who are looking to hire a wedding photographer, be careful.  Truly consider if a wedding photographer is worth it.  A lot of them do wedding photography on the side, a real indication that they are not talented or skilled enough to support themselves off wedding photography alone.  If at the end of contemplating the situation you feel that a wedding photographer is right for you, I wish you good luck in getting the quality pictures that you expect.

 

 

 

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The Under $10,000 Wedding: Wedding dress budget

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in wedding dress, wedding expenses

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The terms “budget” and “wedding dress” are almost contradictions.  The traditional stance on wedding dresses is that it is the bride’s day and that the wedding dress should be whatever she wants.  With this type of enabling and money-be-damned attitude, it is very easy to see how a wedding dress budget can become an afterthought or a slight inconvenience that can be explained away later.  However, if you and your partner are determined to stick to your wedding budget, then the wedding dress has to stay within the budget.

Since the groom typically isn’t invited to the wedding dress picking, agreeing on and trusting your partner to buy a wedding dress that is within the budget is key.  According to theknot.com, wedding attire should be about 8% to 10% of the total wedding cost.  Using the $10,000 budget, the cost of the dress should be somewhere between $800 and $1,000.  Whatever figure you and your partner settle on, it should be shared with all who are part of the dressing selecting process in an attempt to minimize things getting out of hand and allowing an expensive group-think session to take place.  Something to be aware of is the cost of extra items associated with the dress such as tailoring fees, garment bags, preservation kits, and other last minute add-ons which may seem useful, but can easily result in spending far more than what has been budgeted.  Once the wedding is over, the wedding dress will be an item that will be placed into a closet and maybe taken out every five years or so.  Trying to preserve it immaculately using a variety of highly overpriced kits and other items is a tremendous waste of money.

 

 

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The Under $10,000 Wedding: Food choices

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Wedding Food, Wedding Reception

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Selecting the right food choices is a key part in ensuring that your wedding does not go over budget.  In short, choose the cheapest options.  With that said, there is an art to choosing the cheapest, or at least the cheaper, option.  Depending on the food choices, some items can seem obviously cheap.  These are the choices that you want to avoid.  For example, spaghetti can come off as a cheaper option than lasagna in the same way that chicken appears to be an inferior selection to steak.  The food choices should appear “fancy” so that when your guests are sent the menu with the food choices they are left with the distinct impression that you and your partner are going all out for your wedding.  This can help to shift the amount of money that guests spend on gifts.  Spending an extra dollar or two on a food item that seems “fancier” can pay off in the end with better gifts as guests are more likely to give generously at a wedding that features steak and salmon as opposed to one that serves chicken and spaghetti.

In addition, vegetarian options can be great for saving money.  These options, while most likely overpriced compared to the real world, are probably some of the cheapest meal choices on the menu.  Take advantage of this fact and put a vegetarian option on the menu (if you don’t want to say “vegetarian,” you can disguise the dish as “pasta,” assuming, of course, that the dish doesn’t have meat in it).

Once you make your food choices, you can also sway people to choose certain dishes.  Guests will often ask which food choice is the best.  If given this opportunity, throw your support behind the cheapest option or, at a minimum, a dish with a mid-level price tag.  Your recommendation can hold more weight if you mention that you have tasted the dish you are recommending and truly enjoyed it.  For the most part, people have exceedingly low expectations for wedding food.  As long as the food isn’t frozen in the middle, grossly undercooked, displaying obvious signs of mold, or otherwise prepared in a way that would send the dish spiraling into the trash can in an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, wedding guests won’t protest.

 

 

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The Under $10,000 Wedding: Limiting guests

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in wedding expenses, wedding on a budget, Wedding Reception

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Limiting guests is a critical part to keeping costs under $10,000.  Sometimes, painful wedding guest “cuts” must be made, but they will be worth it.  One of the most important factors in limiting guests is keeping the wedding quiet and ensuring that news of the wedding doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, also known as those who will require you to invite a group of people to ensure that there will be no ramifications.  For many, this involves people from work or certain segments of the family.

You may like many, if not all of your co-workers, however, that doesn’t mean that you want to be filling up a table or two and burning a significant amount of cash on paying for your co-workers’ meals at your wedding.  Many offices and departments like to pretend that everyone is really close with one another.  While this may be true when you are working on a project, these bonds might not extend outside of the office.  For this reason, keeping your wedding quiet in the office is a good idea and enables you to avoid having to invite all you co-workers and their plus ones without creating hard feelings or bitterness that could have a negative impact on you in the future.  In addition, inviting people from your office involves inviting people who make approximately the same amount of money as you do, unless you decide only to invite higher-ups.  From a purely financial standpoint, these people are unlikely to give generously and will most likely result in you receiving gifts that don’t cover the costs associated with their presence.

Likewise, avoiding certain levels of family members can be an effective cost-limiting move.  While ideally it would be great to be able to invite both close and distant relatives, in reality, it is not really an option.  For this reason, carefully selecting just how far out into the family circle your guest list ventures is critical.  If one second cousin is invited, but not others, that could cause family drama that can follow you and your partner around for years to come.

 

 

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Yes You Can: Make your $10,000 wedding seem like it was much more

23 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in wedding expenses, wedding on a budget, Wedding Reception

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Perception is key for a wedding.  It doesn’t matter how much you actually spent; what matters is that your guests think that you spent a lot.  The wedding industry pushes the fact that you should spend a lot of money on your wedding, however, you can use smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of significant wedding expenses.  Do not accept the prevalent notion that weddings, at least good, classy weddings, are supposed to be very costly.  Work to dispel this common and incorrect perception.  First, weddings don’t have to be costly to be classy, and second, it makes no financial sense to spend a lot on a wedding, which is essentially a glorified party.

Creating a wedding that seems expensive is a lot like going to a job interview.  For men, a job interview entails dressing up nicely in a suit or other formal business wear and giving a perspective employer the best possible impression of yourself for a few hours.  Similarly, a wedding involves the dressing up and presenting yourself well for an extended period of time.  A prospective employer doesn’t know that the suit you wore to the interview was borrowed from a friend or that the tie was purchased from Goodwill; all that matters is that you looked professional and businesslike at the interview.  Likewise, a wedding doesn’t have to involve a lot of money to seem fancy.  It just involves putting pieces together in a nice, presentable manner beginning with the venue choice.

 

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Yes You Can: Have a profitable wedding

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in wedding on a budget, Wedding Reception, wedding traditions

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I believe that if you are truly honest with yourself, the concept of spending a lot of your own or someone else’s money on your wedding is hard to accept.  Blowing what could be the down payment on a house in a single night is the antithesis financial responsibility.  If you lost that amount of money at a casino in a single night, you would be called an addict, a loser, and a whole host of other names, but lose that much money on a wedding and no one says a word even though the loss of the money at a casino versus at a wedding could take approximately the same amount of time.  However, just because nothing is said doesn’t change the fact that a lot of money vanished in a few hours.  For this reason, making your wedding night a profitable night is critical and should be one of the day’s primary goals.  And even if you fall short of making a profit, you might break even or lose less money in a night than you would have had you not tried to have a profitable wedding.

Although financial stress is one of the main factors which lead to the end of marriages, finances are, in my opinion, not discussed enough during the planning process.  The idea that a wedding will lose the bride and groom money has become accepted and the norm.  This concept makes no sense.  A wedding is to celebration a union and should not be something that costs someone money.  When friends take someone out for a birthday, the person having the birthday typically has his or her meal paid for.  The person having the birthday doesn’t invite a bunch of guests who expect the person having the birthday to pay for everyone.  That would be illogical and ridiculous.  However, in the wedding world, that’s exactly what happens and this process has become a ridiculous tradition that is perpetuated by wedding companies, vendors, family members, and friends.

My sincere belief is that a wedding should be profitable.  It is currently a foreign concept, however, it can be done and done well.  To determine the profitability of a wedding, the total costs are subtracted from the total received.  The way that my wife and I calculated the total value of the gifts received was to create a spreadsheet.  If someone purchased something off our registry, then we used the figure in the registry to determine the value, regardless of if the person actually got the gift from the store at which we were registered or paid the price on the registry.  If we had a $50 French press on the registry and received it, we put $50 into the spreadsheet.  Obviously, cash is just counted and added.  We then counted up our wedding vendor receipts and determined if we profited or not.  Ultimately, our profit was several thousand dollars, most of which went to paying for a honeymoon and some toward the down payment on a house.  The profit didn’t occur because a single guest or parent wrote out a giant check that became the several thousand dollar surplus; the profit occurred because we pieced our wedding together carefully and resulted in us turning a profit off of the majority of guests.  The money we received from family members was extra and was not the deciding factor between a profitable or unprofitable wedding.  I believe that if you follow certain guidelines, you too can make your wedding night a profitable celebration of your new union.

The road to a profitable wedding is not easy. There is no established path for you to follow and it isn’t typical as most don’t pay for their own wedding (you can’t say you turned a profit when you didn’t pay for anything yourself). It is frustrating and it often incites anger, disbelief, or the “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude from family members, friends, coworkers, and others who hear that you want to use your wedding to, gasp, make money. However, when you do turn a profit, being able to tell your most outspoken doubters and skeptics what you accomplished is oh so sweet.

 

 

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The under $10,000 wedding: Choosing a venue

28 Saturday Nov 2015

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The goal of having a wedding that doesn’t cost a lot, but seems like it costs a lot, is largely based on the venue.  Many people have been to weddings that are in an obviously cheap location like someone’s backyard.  I, personally, have been to a wedding that took place in a barn (which is pretty much someone’s backyard) and used bales of hay as seats.  It was itchiest and most uncomfortable wedding I have ever attended.  When I received the invitation, I immediately thought it would be horrible.  I was right: it was also the worst wedding I have ever been to.  While this is an extreme example, it shows how the venue chosen can have an immediate impact on how the wedding is viewed.  In this case, having a wedding in a barn immediately screams “cheap” to all involved and will, most likely, cause guests to adjust their gifts accordingly.  However, if you have your wedding at a hotel like the Marriott or the Hilton, guests immediately think that the wedding will be pretty classy and nice simply based on the location.  It is this perception that allows the true cost of the wedding to be disguised while also manipulating the type of gifts that will be received.  A wedding in a barn will be associated with cheap and bringing a $20 per person gift doesn’t seem unreasonable; a wedding in the Hilton seems fancier and a $50 per person gift seems far more reasonable.

Contrary to what many believe, a lot of “name brand” wedding venues do not have an extraordinarily high minimum cost, especially if you are getting married either at the very beginning or end of the wedding season or in an “off” time of the year.  Once you choose the date, the negotiating can begin with various venues.

 

 

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Yes You Can: Have a wedding for under $10,000

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized, wedding on a budget

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The under $10,000 wedding is the “holy grail” of having a wedding on a budget.  It is possible and it isn’t that difficult to pull off once you figure out how to properly balance the perception of your wedding and the costs to create that perception.

The following weeks will detail how to pull off a $10,000 wedding and how to make it seem like it was far more than $10,000.  It is not a myth, it is definitely possible and is based on the wedding planning experiences of me and my wife.

 

 

Have a comment, question, or topic that you want written about?  Send an email to  weddingplanningformen@gmail.com.