Wedding Profits

Today's flavor - butter creme frosting: an overly sweetened confection and short-lived pleasure

I'm helping a friend with her wedding plans, and this served as a convenient reason to spend hours browsing all the yummy wedding/bridal sites and brilliant ideas to be found online. *Sigh* I've been married 11 years, and my wedding happened before you could do more than send a few dial-up emails on that interweb thingy. Well, it's a different world, but one thing has not changed: weddings and all wedding-related paraphernalia are ex-pen-$ive. (If you really want to class the thing up, anyway.) Hey, put your hand down -I know there are plenty of inexpensive, really lovely options if you're just creative enough. Still, even if our friends are not quite American Express Black posh - plastic cutlery, mid-shelf booze, a home-made cake, and your neighbor's teenage son serving as DJ is not going to work. Flowers, decent food, non-crap favors, and wedding-worthy photography should not be done on the cheap. My big gripe - and don't I always have many? - is that providers of wedding products and services are so willing to take advantage of the fact that this is the dream day and has to be "perfect" - and perfect is gonna cost you.

Of course, all the money in the world won't buy you class. Such a proud day for Mariah's mom.

Well, it turns out, you can comfortably go into temporary (hopefully temporary) debt to pay for your wedding and come out ahead. Pray tell, how? you ask. The key is matching your budget to your guest list. Let's face it, you're doing this anyway - you know you want the childhood friends and not-so-beloved relatives to be properly impressed and without any fodder for derision.

[This post is being interrupted to roll my eyes at readers who swear they are so "down-to-earth" they would have paper plates and canned beer at their own weddings; and of course, when they attend a wedding, they are strictly there to share in a special day. Well, go buckle up your Birkenstocks and braid your armpit hair, while the rest of us enjoy a yummy cup of real life.]

Expensive and tasteful don't always go hand-in-hand.

Where was I? Right. Brides and mothers-of-brides, take a good, hard look at your guest list. Do you have enough "A" list guests? These are not necessarily the people that you most adore. These are the people that write big checks either out of obligation, guilt, pity, pride, ostentatiousness or even generosity. Also, create a second guest list. This one is of acquaintances, people who probably don't like you, business associates that run in much wealthier social circles than you, and people who live much too far away to travel to your wedding. And ladies, don't forget your exes - nothing says "I'm over you, see how well I'm doing" like a check dripping with zeroes. Odds are, most of these people will send their regrets with a $weet gift.

For my friends' wedding, we have a challenging dynamic: this couple is getting married well into their thirties - not old, or "late" as far as I'm concerned, but at the age where they are both in a better financial position than their parents. So, while potential invitees would expect such a well-heeled couple to have an elegant affair, the bride and groom, are in fact, the "can't we just have a picnic?" types. Although they can certainly afford posh, they are sadly, quite practical. They insist that the nice chunk of change required for even an average wedding celebration would be put to better use as the 10% down for their new home. Oh, well, if you're going to talk sense, you're really limiting your options, aren't you? So, in addition to helping to design center pieces and talking the bride out of wearing a sun dress, I'm tasked with extolling the, ahem, virtues of the Wedding for Profit concept.

While I'm writing this it occurs to me that I'm going to have start programming my husband (and start a wedding fund) today, as my oldest is 10 and plans to get married in 17 years. I mean what if she wants a designer frock, like this Reem Acra couture, for her big day? Hmmmm, maybe a sun dress is not such a bad idea.