The High Cost of Tying the Knot

Whether you settle for a quiet get-together with family and friends in the garden, or a lavish weekend do-I-do at a manor house in the country, getting married is an expense that could put that richer or poorer pledge to the test before you even say your vows. Here’s how to handle the budget on your Big Day

Marriage is a contract between parties, and few parties are as significant as the one you hold on the day you get married. “For richer or for poorer,” runs the pledge, the latter being the likelier option once you’ve tallied up the bill.

Unless, of course, like the Russian oligarch who spent $1-billion on his daughter’s wedding – he hired Sting and Jennifer Lopez to sing at the reception – you have no need to trifle with budgetary constraints.

For the rest of us, who have to make to do with the guy who runs the local mobile disco, the big question, next to whether or not we take our beloved to be our lawful wedded spouse, is whether we can afford to get married in the first place. Well, of course we can.

The cost of living happily ever after is always negotiable. All you have to do its start with your ultimate fairytale fantasy wedding, and bring the budget down from there.

To get a sense of what that means, we invited three experts in wedding affairs into the BrightRock studio, to share their thoughts in an Iris Session with David O’Sullivan.

On the couch: wedding planner Khali Collins, owner of The Wedding Specialists; and Mike Sharman, co-founder of the ad agency, Retroviral, who recently tied the knot with his wife, Taryn. And beaming in from Cape Town, our resident financial commentator and common sense adviser, Maya Fisher-French.

As Maya sees it, wedding planning should not be seen as something separate from financial planning.

“You need to ask yourself, what are your goals and aspirations? If a wedding now means not being able to put a deposit down on your dream home, is that the decision you want to be making?”

If you borrow R100,000 for the wedding – and a lot of couples are now financing their own weddings, says Maya – you’ll be paying off R5,500 a month for the next three years.

Better to scale your wedding realistically according to what you can afford, advises Khali. The most expensive budget she’s had to work with was R8-million, but on average, you can look at spending between R2,000 and R2,500 per wedding guest.

“Some clients do want a champagne wedding on a beer budget,” she says, but you can manage your costs by taking a good look at what you really need on the day. Do you really need a bottle of red wine and white wine on each table? No, says Khali. Rather make it an option on the menu.

“What’s more important to you? Do you want to focus on the drinks and people having fun, or do you want to focus on this great lavish dress? Where are you prepared to spend money?”

For Mike and Taryn, who both work in advertising, the answer was to approach their wedding with the same attention to detail and cost as they would approach a campaign for a client.

They broke their wedding down into “pre-production, “production”, and “post-production”, incorporating every element from the bachelor party to the service to the reception.

“We sat down and discussed all the items,” says Mike, “and then unfortunately you have the miscellaneous line item which continues to grow and grow as that big day nears. It was important to start off with a base of, what are we trying to achieve from this day, from an execution point of view? What is the delivery?”

Being in the industry also brought other benefits, such as the gift of a day’s free videography from a friend who also works for an ad agency.

“You have to strike that balance between affordability and the wedding of your dreams,” says Mike, who thoroughly researched options for a venue online, before settling on Old Mac Daddy, a retro-hip “trailer farm” in Elgin in the Cape.

Hosting your wedding in an out-of-the-way place is also a good way to put a cap on numbers, laughs Mike, because only your true pals and close family will make the trek.

It’s now become commonplace for couple to start their wedding planning on social media, says Khali, although that can create false expectations of a “Pinterest-perfect” wedding.

And that’s just the trouble, adds Maya, who happily admits that she rented a wedding dress for her big day, rather than splash out on tailor-made garment that she would only wear once.

“Don’t place your entire happiness on one perfect day,” she advises. “Go with the flow. Enjoy it, celebrate. And if it pours with rain and the cake collapses, don’t worry about it!”

Whatever the budget, wherever the venue, whatever the table settings, it’ll still be a day you’ll remember all your life, for all the right reasons.

For more advice and insight on planning your wedding day, watch the full BrightRock Iris Session below: