Marriage and the Power of Divorce

Grab some speakers, a portable WIFI hotspot for your laptop, and you're GTG. Book up each Saturday night every month and pull in an extra $150,000 a year working 5 hours extra a week. I'm sold.

I can see spending good money on a photographer. But I can't see how a DJ could justify much more than a grand or $1,500 for the evening. I guess it depends on how much of the A/V and lighting they supply, but man 2-3k sounds like a lot of money for 6-8 hours work.

Just be glad none of you are Chinese. Or at least, few of you I guess. Good friend of mine got married in his mid 20's to some fat shrew that ended up leaving him a couple years later and turning dike. Her family was poor, so he and his family footed the bill for the entire thing. I think he said 400+ people, and that all told it was close to or over 100k. Not only did he have to buy that cunt out of his house when she left, he was paying off the wedding bills long after the divorce was finalized. That cunt must have cost him at least a couple hundred grand when it was all said and done. He was and to some extent still is a broken man, we can't find him a nice girl to settle down with because the desperation is so apparent so quickly.

His younger bro is now engaged, and he's trying to avoid a 500 person wedding. Problem is, his girlfriend and her family are fairly traditional, and she's also got some unrealistic expectations. So to avoid having a huge wedding, they were thinking about having a destination wedding. The first two ideas that were discussed were in a French castle (her idea, apparently she thinks she's a fucking princess) or in Bali (his idea). I told them "well, those are great ideas if you want to limit the number of guests. Not so great if you want anyone other than me and Dan at the wedding." Dan is the only other one of our friends that could afford to drop 4-8k on a friend's wedding (we've already had two destination weddings in the past 2 years). Dunno what they are thinking of now.

If I ever do get married, it's going to be an awesome party. There might be a dozen or two family on my side (immediate family, grandparents, maybe a couple aunts/uncles and cousins, but not many), and then it'll all be friends after that. No presents will be accepted; donate to a charity in my name if you want.

Eomer_sl said:

If I ever do get married, it's going to be an awesome party. There might be a dozen or two family on my side (immediate family, grandparents, maybe a couple aunts/uncles and cousins, but not many), and then it'll all be friends after that. No presents will be accepted; donate to a charity in my name if you want.

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The lion's share of the money should be spent on the reception over the service itself, in my opinion. Then again, I'm one of those people who insists on showing my guests a good time.

Deathwing_sl said:

Unless you want to get married in a french castle too, how is that not a big neon warning sign to not marry that woman? She ain't going to stop at just an extravagant wedding.

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She's actually a really nice person, everyone likes her. She's not bitchy or two faced or anything like that. She does have expensive tastes, but so does her fiancee. He's a lawyer, she has a masters in econ and is working on an MBA, so they should make some decent coin once they get fully established, so money wise they should work well together. By spending every penny of each other's earnings the day before they receive it.

who pays for the service/ceremony? If you get married in a church they maybe ask you for a couple hundred bucks donation.

I paid a lot for my wedding according to the masses on this board so I won't criticize people who pay a lot for a ceremony. To each their own.

Nothing like living just barely inside your means even though your household income is probably in the top 5% of the nation.

We didn't even do any showers. We told people we didn't need anything at all and it would be a waste. We're already established so save your money. A few people still sent us money against our wishes, so all we could do was be gracious towards them.

Just try to plan a wedding that will be a good time for everyone.. And wait for bridezilla to come out, trust me. No matter what type of girl you have, she's in there.

I can imagine having a photobooth at the reception would be a huge hit.

I think spending money on a good photographer would be money well-spent. DJ? Not so much. I have a friend who DJ'ed for another friend's wedding for around $500. He also plays guitar and sings very well and played a toned down acoustic set during dinner before revving up the party at the DJ station.

Seriously, you shouldn't be allowed to spend more than 2K on your " vow free wedding", then if you actually make it 5 years you can then spend whatever you want on your real "wedding" since you've actually proven that your vows may actually mean something. People who go into debt for their wedding and are still paying off the bill while footing lawyer fees for their divorce is pretty much akin to modern day Darwinism if you ask me.

Tuco_sl said:

Don't kid yourself because this isn't true. My wife and most of the women I know weren't bridezillas. Just the bitches are.

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This. My wife was every bit as cheap as I was when it came to our wedding. She had no unrealistic expectations of what her "dream day" was to be about. Of course, my wife also feels the same way about diamonds that I do (waste of hard earned cash) so I really do think I have the most awesome wife out there. For me, anyways.

We had 3 showers, one on my side of the family, one on her side of the family and one from her work. We're in the process of building a new house, so pretty much everything we registered for was with the new house in mind. We got a surprising amount of gifts off the registry, more than I thought we would and I attribute that to the fact that people know we are building a house. I think we ended up with around $5k in cash, gift cards included.

OneofOne_sl said:

This. My wife was every bit as cheap as I was when it came to our wedding. She had no unrealistic expectations of what her "dream day" was to be about. Of course, my wife also feels the same way about diamonds that I do (waste of hard earned cash) so I really do think I have the most awesome wife out there. For me, anyways.

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Yep, my wife is the same way, even down to the diamond business. The ring I bought her for engagement was a ruby.

And Arative, sounds like you ended up pretty flush. When you get your house built, give me a buzz and we'll party in it. (j/k) The bills when building a house just keep on-a comin'.

Tuco_sl said:

Yeah the multiple showers things makes sense for different groups of friends. I don't know what kind of entitled couple thinks they need themed showers where the same groups of people show up to multiple showers.

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It's largely a burden on the maid of honor, who is expected to have a hand in planning and attending all of them. I've had multiple people tell me about wanting to strangle bridges who expect you to bring a gift to each shower.

We did a DJ for our wedding, the one thing that the DJ really helped with was moving things along and keeping people updated. "Couple is being kidnapped by the photographer, enjoy some drinks" "Dinner will be served soon, let the wedding party go first" "It is time for toasts" "It is time for the first dance" "It is time to cut the cake" "Last call for the bar" etc. Now is that service worth some of the prices people are talking about? Maybe not. I don't recall what we paid for ours, $1k-$2k maybe. I don't regret having one nor what we paid for it, but a lot of what we were paying for was peace of mind that we didn't have to put together any sort of ipod/playlist nor depend on a family member or friend to take care of all that for us rather than enjoying the party.

re: Photographers, I think a lot of people underestimate how much time is spent processing and editing photos, which should be factored into the costs. I just did a maternity session for some friends, 200 photos and maybe 12-15 finalized photos and I have probably put in a good 20+ hours in Lightroom already. I'm sure a pro would be much more efficient than me but I know we ended up with several thousand photos from our photographer, at least 300 edits plus she put together a couple of albums for us. That is a ton of post-processing time, even for a pro.