If you’ve been thinking weddings have been getting a little OTT lately, you’re right.
US website The Knot just released the results of their 10th annual Real Wedding Survey and the results are, well, enough to give your bank balance the nervous sweats.
The average cost of a wedding in the US is now $35,329 (around $46,000 AUD – the average here is roughly $36,000) and a big chunk of that expense is going towards ‘entertainment’ for the guests.
Yep, all those photobooths, food trucks and personalised doughnut walls add up. Gone are the days when you could just rely on your wedding guests to get drunk and crack onto each other.
According to The Knot, average wedding costs in the US went up by eight per cent between 2015 and 2016, while the average number of attendees actually dropped.
"Couples are personalising their weddings in a way that we haven’t seen before, and that’s a trend that has been up-and-coming for the last five or ten years,” Stephanie Cain, an editor at The Knot, told ATTN.
Vogue has named the wedding trends that are over for 2017. Post continues...
“It’s not cookie cutter anymore. Couples aren’t just going to the banquet hall down the street and asking for a basic package. They really want to put their own personal stamp on every aspect of their wedding.”
So the good news is wedding guests are getting more bang for their wedding buck, but the bad news is they're probably paying for it in the long run.
“The higher price the couple pays, the more guests are going to end up paying. Whether it be a destination wedding, or what the couple’s registering for, money begets money and big affairs beget big affairs," Christen Moynihan from The Broke Ass Bride recently told ATTN.
As Anna Pedersen, from the Bride's Diary, told Mamamia earlier this year, more and more Australian couples are opting for more 'unique' wedding venues, which cost more than the traditional options.
"2017 will see more destination weddings in unique venues," Pedersen explains.
"Barns, farm sheds, stables, tents, and tepees" are all on-trend wedding locations.
If you add that to the photographer, the photo booth, the DJ, the lolly stand, the doughnut wall, the individualised bonbonnieres, the food truck, the ring toss and the chocolate fountain, it's easy to see how the bills quickly pile up.
And why guests feel like they need to spending more and more on wedding gifts and wishing wells.
Some brides are also opting to have two dresses - one for the wedding ceremony and another one for cutting sick on dance floor at the reception.
Earlier this year when blogger Jessie Habermann tied the knot with Captain of the Carlton AFL football team, Marc Murphy, she opted for two dresses.
Actress Anna Camp did the same when she wed Skylar Astin.
Who knows what could be next?
Have you noticed any other exxy wedding trends? Share them in the comments below.
Top Comments
Sigh. How many of those people realise it's all about the marriage not the wedding? Starting off married life in tons of debt is just going to make the marriage harder. Isn't property debt hard enough?
I think there was a groom there too,but maybe he was there just to make up the numbers