I love hearing about weddings and marriages! I'm a newlywed (how long do I get to say that? 10 years?), we just tied the knot in March of this year. We spent $3000 on our wedding, my mom gave me $1000, and we put up the other 2k. We are in our thirties and did not need more household goods, so we didn't ask for gifts at all, people assumed that meant we wanted cash and we received over $2000 in cash and gifts cards.
We talked about a lot of ideas when we first got engaged, we thought we might want to do a destination wedding, but I vetoed that because my family would never be able to afford plane tickets. I did the majority of the planning and I'm the more frugal between us so that helped considerably. The things that were most important to us were great food and lots of booze and our closest friends and family. We had a guest list of less than 50, and spent over a third of our budget on food and booze. We did a backyard wedding at my MIL's because she has a lovely big horse property with grass and trees and it looks great in photos. Having it at a private residence saved us TONS, because it was free for the venue and we weren't locked into using their catering or having to hire a professional bartender. I bought our booze at Costco!
Some suggestions for your big day:
Make the guest list ASAP, don't spend much on paper stuff (nobody cares and it gets thrown away eventually), try to find a free venue, don't let other people tell you what you want, and don't listen to other people when they inevitably make disparaging remarks about your wedding. People have a lot of opinions about how weddings should be done but they aren't the ones paying for it! Don't stress about writing your own vows, literally no one remembers, try to remember the vows you heard exchanged at any wedding you've ever been to? You can't, so go traditional or google generic ones that sound nice in the moment. Unless having personal vows is super important to you, then ignore me cause I'm being a hater.
I'm so excited for you! Planning our wedding was such fun, and being married is absolutely lovely. BEST WISHES!!!!!!