Kubo King and I got engaged in May of 2017, when we had been together for just over five years. We had talked about getting married for a while, but we were still in school and we thought that getting married required a lot of money. When we did get engaged, we decided to have the wedding a full year later, so that it could happen over summer vacation and we would have time to save money for a big wedding with Kubo King’s family in Hawaii.
We originally set a budget of $10,000. At the time we thought this was a bit extravagant, but it would have actually been a stretch for the kind of wedding we envisioned. We planned to fly to Maui and invite all our extended family (five people for me, about fifty people for him). We would have a ceremony on the beach and cater Filipino food for a big party afterwards. It was a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, and that’s how people get married, and our families would be expecting it, and…
As the date drew closer, it looked like we would reach our savings goal a few months early. But at the same time, we hadn’t begun any of the planning for the wedding. Kubo King joked that he was looking forward to the wedding, he just wished that someone else would plan it for us. And we were also both becoming more money conscious. He was on the job market and thinking about paying off his student loans. We had just moved into a better kubo, and we were worried about making our new budget work until he found a job.
And that’s when it hit us — yes, a dream wedding in Hawaii would be beautiful, and fun, and make our families happy; but we could also do a lot of other things with that $10,000 we had nearly saved, things that would last longer than a couple days. We were free to choose the best way to use the money we had earned, and we decided it could do more work for us elsewhere.
So, here’s what we ended up spending to get married. Since we invited only our closest family and my Ph.D. advisor, we had a total of nine guests. They fit nicely in a room at the courthouse for the ceremony and at a local steakhouse for dinner; and we had room to receive everyone in our living room afterwards. My parents footed the bill at the restaurant as their wedding gift to us, bringing our total expenditures to the following:
| Marriage license | $83 |
| Court wedding fee | $80 |
| Wedding bands | $750 |
| Dinner at restaurant | $0 (Gift) |
| Dress | $157 |
| Lingerie | $71 |
| Hotel suite for weekend | $453 |
| Total | $1,625 |
This wasn’t the cheapest wedding on record, but each expenditure was proportional to the value we got from it. The ceremony (which lasted for minutes) was dirt cheap… but the wedding bands (which we will wear and enjoy every day) were the most expensive item.
When deciding to get married in the courthouse, we did wonder if it would be impersonal and if we would have regrets. Even on the day of the wedding, when we were waiting in line with many other couples and their guests, Kubo King felt like we were about to get married in the DMV. He started feeling bad that the guests who had come to witness our wedding wouldn’t have a beautiful ceremony to enjoy. However, when we got into our private courtroom with the judge and our guests, that feeling went away. In the end, it didn’t really matter because our guests still enjoyed it (especially the prime rib after).
So, retrospectively, was it a good decision to get married this way? Absolutely! By the morning of our wedding day, we were both pretty nervous about the ceremony — I had stage fright and he had last-minute cold feet (ok, to be fair I had chilly feet too). The judge who performed our ceremony said some nice things about love and commitment, but I can barely remember any of them now, four months later. We were both relieved to get the papers signed, take a photo outside, and go eat some prime rib. Any fantasy wedding would have probably been a disappointment and we would have later regretted the money it would have cost. Looking back, that $10,000 is doing a better job being our emergency fund while we aggressively pay off all our debt.
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