My point was really about attitude and method as opposed to straight cost.
It's probably bullshit anyway.
Agreed. Attitude is key. As well as just having a little sense.
I lived in Scotland when I married a scottish lass. Maybe 15 people came over from the US. Pretty good I thought since I had not lived there for 12 years. I think a lot of people just decided to make a vacation of it and stayed for a couple weeks.
Like you, I gave a lot of notice, no presents necessary and no biggie if they can't come. Gave lots of suggestions. Maybe had 50 total people at the wedding
but about 200 at the reception. That was our good idea. People
endure the wedding to come to the reception. For the people that lived in the UK, we gave them the choice. They could RSVP for the just the wedding, just the reception, or both.
We had gone to bunch of weddings the year prior and often wished we could have just gone to the reception without looking and feeling like a jackass. So we offered the choice. It was great because it meant we could spend very small for a fast (20 minute) ceremony and were able to go very large on the party afterwards. Which is where all the fun is had.
My wife and I both already owned homes before marrying and did not want more shit. So we asked people not to give physical gifts and we registered both with our travel agent and with a charity
if people wished to give gifts.
This was
not that expensive. The actual wedding venue was only $500. The reception venue was $2000. Another $7,000 for the food/corkage and $3,000 for fireworks and some other wedding entertainment/hotel rooms. $3000 for a videographer/photographer. Plus we dropped the first $3,000 on the bar tab. This was a huge hit because we did not tell anyone until the speeches. After that people bought their own. So
total cost for an absolutely amazing day that is still talked about by loads of people nearly 15 years later was under $20K.
We ended up with about 12K in gifts at the travel agent and another 4K for the charity. So we were only about 5K from breaking even on the thing.