When you’re planning a wedding, everyone, and I mean everyone , feels the need to offer you unsolicited advice.  Your mom, your friends, your hairstylist, and even a friend of a cousin’s friend’s neighbor’s coworker – they all have an opinion on some aspect of your wedding.

This venue is the best, you should have more flowers, you should never have a cash shower (it’s bad manners!)… on and on the list goes.  Here are some of the many aggravating opinions I heard when I was planning my wedding.

Any dress that costs less than $1,000 is garbage.

You need to have flowers on every table or the reception won’t look nice enough.

You can’t have a small ceremony – people will be so upset if they are only invited to the reception!

You should check out this awesome venue [that was five times our budget]!

A cash bar is the most offensive idea anyone has ever had.

Oh…that’s where you’re planning to have the ceremony?

A cash shower is tacky and will make everyone angry.  [It’s irrelevant that you have no space to store gifts].

How can you skip the limo?  The guests will see you driving a regular car (gasp!)?  [It’s almost like you’re a regular person!]

Of course, all of these opinions involve spending more money.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard “splurge on this – you can save money somewhere else.”  As a frugal person, this frustrates me to no end.

Weddings are absurdly expensive. 

When you’re planning a frugal wedding, you need to keep costs low in EVERY area of your budget or you will likely end up spending way more than you intended to on the total cost of the wedding.

My biggest wedding-related regret is worrying that guests would be offended by certain “tacky” things, and spending more money as a result of that concern.  In retrospect, any family members who cared about how “tacky” something was really weren’t people whose opinions should’ve mattered.

None of my friends saw anything wrong with a cash bar or cash shower.  They viewed these things as practical and were baffled as to why they would be considered poor etiquette.  Maybe that’s because they are millennials too, and their expectations are different than that of older generations.  Many older relatives don’t really understand what it’s like to be buried in student loan debt because college used to be affordable, and they didn’t graduate with five to six figures of student loan debt.

If you are a millennial who’s buried in student loan debt and is paying for your entire wedding yourself (without the help of your parents), stop caring what others think and worrying if things are “tacky” or poor etiquette.

Having a wedding is extremely expensive, and anyone who truly cares about you should understand that you are doing your best to stick to a tight budget.

[callout title=” text=’Your wedding day should not be about money or impressing others; it should be about celebrating the love between you and your new spouse.’ button_text=” button_link=”]

If anyone tells you that you’re being “tacky”, politely remind them that you are paying for your entire wedding yourself and that the most important thing is that you are marrying the love of your life.

Your wedding day should not be about money or impressing others; it should be about celebrating the love between you and your new spouse.

 

(*Featured image courtesy of Studio Delphianblue).

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