Its not that bad actually, but I could definitely use some help from the wise mustachians.
My partner and I are quite early in our mustached journeys and have the noble goal of spending close to nothing on the wedding while still creating something meaningful for the two of us that does not horridly hurt our parents. I am currently unemployed and my career is mostly federal. It seems very unlikely that I will have a job before any hiring freezes go into effect. I may be returning to school soon to retrain for a different career, or just to buy time and a graduate degree I needed to do at some point anyways, so we really don't have much financial leeway right now.
We are planning on getting hitched in the next couple months. Both sets of parents have offered help with the funding but for a variety of reasons we are reluctant to accept it. My parents are in bad shape financially and will not realize just how bad until they find themselves completely broke and old (now likely without proper SSI or medicare! Wheeee!). His parents are in better/good shape, but it's the principle of the thing, plus they are more likely to try to use money to influence the affair.
So our ideal would be to do something like this:http://offbeatbride.com/summit-elopement/ or go to the courthouse unaccompanied, but all of our parents would be heartbroken. Alternately, a park wedding barbecue could be lovely, but it's winter (he has good insurance, we don't want to wait till summer because we'd like to get me on it). Our house is very small and would not work to host both sets of parents and siblings.
Ideas I have so far:
There is a local hall we could rent for $150 plus $200 of liability insurance. With no decorations beyond our festival camp decorations and some friends I could hire for music for $1000 (we're from a very musical community: canned music is not really an option if it is at all the focus of the event, but this quote includes a huge gift/discount from the band), plus $200 for rings, nothing for clothes (sad) nothing for photography (I really really want a nice picture or two of us dressed up nice..) and I guess a huge pot of vegetarian chili we could pull off a party for all our friends/family for less than $2000. We might need to rent some tables in addition to this. We'd try to put out the word to donate to charity rather than give us anything, or try to get people to think of their potluck dish as the gift.
We could get married and not tell anyone, and have a park barbecue potluck in June with a ceremony and pretend it was a new thing :) Cost: rings and license, so about $300 plus some potluck food this summer. This probably isn't a good idea, as much as I wish it was.
We could go to the courthouse with our families. My parents will insist on bringing everyone out to dinner, and probably try to make it somewhere moderately fancy. Cost (for us: ~300. For parents: ~400 or up).
Put out a Facebook call to our greater community to see if anyone would let us host a potluck party at their house. Cost: 300 for rings and license, possibly hire the band, provide some food, so ~1500 for all friends and family.
Any other ideas?