Say " I do", in what cost?

I still got lots of complement about our wedding from friends and net friends. They keep wondering how much I have spent on our big day. Just so today I was working on a "project" and browsing some wedding related website again. I, too, started to wondering , if this wedding is not under my super tight budget management, how much would it cost normally?


When I planned my wedding, I spent months to look for venues, food and interviewing staffs. Not only I compare their price, I also made lots of custom arrangement to lower the cost. For example, we didn't use a catering company. The buffet style reception and open bar we wanted to serve in our wedding was simple way over the budget we have. A menu like us, which had all you can eat fleshy open raw oyster, sashimi, crab claw, lamp chop, BBQ sucking pig and more, would easily go over $60 CAD per head. Besides, it is extremely hard to find one single caterer that can produce all these fresh and tasty food. At the end, my solution was order each dish from different restaurant and have my closed family and friends to pick it up for me. And I also hired an individual chef term to manage the buffet station for me. As a result, I hot my hotel like buffet station with good foods and fine dinning services. This is just one example how I stretched my budget and human resource to produce a wedding in unbelievably low cost.

Anyway, this is a little summary of my budget:

My original budget projection is $12000. Honestly, this number is impossible to support the fanciness of my wedding. But I actually made this number with a few hundreds dollars less. These all thanks to our dearest dearest friends who thought in big helpful gifts one after one. We don't have to pay for our 3 nights of wedding stay in 4-stars hotel. We don't have to pay for the wedding hair styling for me my wedding parties. We also don't have to pay for all the custom invitation and wedding program fan prints. All these come up to a total of over $1500 CAD extra.

To produce a wedding of the same size and same level of fanciness in Canada,  but without all these gift from our friends and my super budget effective arrangement, such as whole lots of DIY and sourcing directly from factory in China. The same wedding will cost: