Make your wedding the time of your life
(without breaking the bank)
The ring hadn’t even been sized for my finger before visions of a grand wedding began dancing in my head.
Soon, I was flipping through brochures and perusing Web sites looking for the perfect location to host this grand wedding.
Since my fiancé and I were living in Connecticut at the time — with our families in Kentucky, California and Pennsylvania and our friends around the globe — settling on a suitable location was beginning to turn my fantasy into a nightmare.
Still, onward I went, repeating the bride’s mantra that in the end it would be worth all the stress.
After a few months of research — freshly armed with the knowledge that the average wedding (in 2000) cost $20,000 — my fiancé and I were frantic.
Twenty-thousand dollars?! That was a down payment on a house. I mean a dress, invitations, food. Surely a great wedding could be accomplished for less than my first two cars cost. Then I discovered the phrase that would soon be the bane of my existence — Additional Fee.
Turns out, everything, and I do mean every thing, costs extra, when it comes to weddings. Don’t assume, for example, that just because you rent a banquet hall the chairs will be included.
As the months dragged on, stress had overtaken our excitement. I was envisioning all of the harried brides I had known — incessant bickering with fiancés, battles with mothers over insane details like whether to use pink or rose colors and so exhausted that the wedding day itself was a blur and the honeymoon night more pure than a pre-school sleepover.
I made up my mind — I would not put myself in debt until my 20th anniversary to pay for a day I would barely remember.
Then, while reading a story about new wedding trends, I hit upon the perfect idea — Destination Wedding.
I quickly learned that a destination wedding was an industry unto itself. And I began examining the many possibilities — from inviting everyone we knew to join us for nuptials on an exotic island, to having just close family witness an Italian hillside ceremony followed by receptions at home, to eloping to Hawaii for a sunset wedding beside a waterfall.
In the meantime, I kept seeing that ever-playing Sandals Resort commercial on TV. You know the one — nearly a decade later it’s still accompanied by the same song, “(I’ve had) The Time of My Life.” Cheesy, I thought. I was envisioning something more — well, I didn’t know — but I didn’t want a cookie-cutter wedding, even if it was on an island.
We considered a tiny church on a bluff overlooking the sea in rural Mexico. Turns out you have to have a blood test by a local doctor, and since you couldn’t travel with your own syringe, I was outie on that idea.
Italy was next up. The shear amount of paperwork and government approvals required nixed that trip.
One very late night, I heard the familiar sounds, “I’ve had the time of my life ... ” followed by something about a ‘weddingmoon.’ I couldn’t sleep, so I Googled Sandals. Before long, I was a fan.
Turns out there is a good reason more than 15,000 couples choose to get married at Sandals all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean and Bahamas every year.
Beyond the exotic locales, it’s relatively inexpensive, a wedding consultant handles all the details, and best of all, the wedding is included in the price. (And yes, it’s perfectly legal with a licensed minister and valid marriage certificate.)
For our wedding, we met with the consultant to choose where we would exchange vows — a picturesque tiny white chapel, a gazebo over the ocean or on the white sand beach. Next we were shown photo books of various cakes, floral arrangements and photography/videography options, from which we selected our choices. It took less than 30 minutes.
(Keep in mind, too, many of these services are provided by elite wedding vendors — such as wedding-cake diva Sylvia Weinstock and event designer Preston Bailey, both of whom have handled events for celebrities like Donald Trump, Catherine Zeta Jones and Hillary Clinton.)
The experience was so stress free, my fiancé and I were able to reflect on what the wedding itself meant, and then able to enjoy a luxurious honeymoon that would have been out of our reach if we’d had what at one time we thought was the “dream” wedding.
While honeymooning, we met a couple whose parents had taken out a $25,000 loan to help pay for their wedding, another couple who had charged $10,000 on credit cards, in addition to the $15,000 they had saved and initially budgeted for their nuptials and another couple who was barely speaking to each other due to fights over wedding expenses. Every couple we met that hadn’t gotten married at the resort, was suffering wedding expense remorse.
Who could blame them?
In Floyd County, the average couple spends between $21,000 to $35,000 for a wedding, not including the engagement ring or honeymoon, according to the market research group The Wedding Report. Across the country, most couples spend twice what they budget for their wedding — anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000, the group reports on costofwedding.com
But with the troubled economy, more than 60 percent of couples say they’re cutting those wedding expenses by an average of 30 percent in the coming year.
The best ways they’re finding to cut those costs? Smaller weddings with fewer guests, destination weddings and all-inclusive honeymoon packages, according to The Wedding Report.
Our weddingmoon consisted of: a limousine ride to and from the airport, round-trip airfare, eight nights in an elegant beachfront room at the all-inclusive resort (which includes all meals, snacks, drinks and activities from scuba diving lessons to kayaking) and the wedding, which included the flowers, cake, an album of 10 5x7 photos of our choice, a video of the ceremony, a reception for four, a honeymoon night dinner, breakfast in bed the next morning, “Just Married” T-shirts and a four-piece place setting of china.
The price: $4,500.
Today’s prices are not much different. At Sandals.com, I found a nearly identical package, including round-trip airfare from Louisville to Montego Bay, Jamaica, seven nights in a Grand Luxe Beachfront room and the basic wedding package mentioned above, in the month of June, for $4,833.
The same package in the resort’s least expensive room was $3,868, while prices for the exclusive beachfront villas with concierge and butler service started at $5,437. As with the room, the wedding event can also be upgraded for extra guests or amenities.
With our 10th anniversary approaching, my husband and I have been discussing a return trip. After all, it truly was “the time of our life."
Story by: LISA KOZAROVICH