I have written and deleted this post several times, because I am continually conflicted about what to do.
Here's our situation. My fiancée are frugal by nature, savers by habit and even before discovering this blog we've been gradually moving towards our own form of mustachian lifestyle. We are also getting married this fall.
To us, we've been 'de-facto married' for years, since we live together, share our finances and lives, and even have a legal common-law status. But the wedding is official for our families and as an expression to them as our love. In the last several years we've both been to weddings of friends that bordered on ludicrous, and we've both had sibblings go through the "bride-zilla" complex, all while trying to stay respectful and biting our tongues. Most of the elaborate, expensive weddings involved untold drama for weeks and ultimately didn't seem to be all that much fun for the guests or the bridge/groom.
So - for our wedding plans we've tried to take a much more laid-back and "friend-friendly" approach.
Here's where it gets tricky. Early on we set a budget for ourselves of $4,000 (which I know some mustachians would face-punch us for, but that was our decision). It pails in comparison to the $20k+ cost for the wedding of each of our older siblings.
She has a dress from a consignment shop, our friends volunteered to do music and DJing (without us ever asking), and the venue is a conservation center that's inexpensive, meaningful to both of us, has all the facilities we need and the proceeds all go to youth education.
Her family has insisted on paying for over half the expenses, even though that wasn't necessary. It was clear that they wanted to do it, so we've accepted.
Then, much later in the process, my parents have generously said that they put funds away for our wedding years ago. They too want to contribute. Both sets of parents are FI and mine are retired with their financial lives secured (and then some).
Our problem is that, at virtually every turn we are being encouraged to spend more, do more, or have more. We've told them we want a simple wedding, and that we want it to be as environmentally friendly as possible and we've had conversations with my parents about how we feel the wedding industry has gotten out of whack, and we don't need or want to follow all of it's 'advice'. Then a day later they balk about our decision to personally call of our guests to tell them to "save-the-date" and they offer instead to have a stationary store print and mail notices at their expense. We are hiring a young friend of ours who is just setting up her photography studio to shoot our wedding, and my dear mother is looking into hiring a second photographer "because two photographers are more likely to cover the ground".
The biggest surprise is that my parents constantly tell me that we should "have the wedding we want, and not cave to what everyone else wants." However, what's become clear throughout all of this is that they are more rigid and set in their ideas than I ever thought they were before.
So mustachians - what to do here? Oddly, money isn't really an issue here. I could accept many of the proposed changes and they would happily pay for all of them. It wouldn't be quite what we had envisioned, but in the end this wedding is as much for our families as it is for my fiancée and me.
Is stubbornly sticking to our somewhat unorthedox version of a wedding selfish? how do I balance what my parents envision (and want to pay for) over our belief that a wedding does not need to cost tens of thousands of $$, and shouldn't be an excuse for needless consumerism ?