Why Weddings Get So Expensive: Ramit Sethi on Hidden Costs, Priorities, and Spending Without Guilt
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and Money for Couples, reacts to real wedding spending stories from Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. The stories range from a couple who each took second jobs to pay for their wedding to a couple who came in more than $3,800 under budget. Sethi says the real question is not how little a couple can spend. It is whether they are spending intentionally or "getting swept up in everybody else's expectations." Across the examples, Sethi returns to a few themes: know your real numbers, take an active role instead of accepting quotes, and decide what the wedding is for before deciding what it costs.
The $10,000 Wedding That Became $35,000
The first story is a Reddit comment about a friend who set a $10,000 ceiling for a 150-person wedding. When the commenter warned her this wasn't realistic, the friend pointed to a venue that supposedly covered "everything" for $5,000. Sethi's reaction was that you can't even get a room in a restaurant for $5,000. As expected, the friend had been looking only at the venue fee.
According to the commenter, the budget has since grown to $35,000. The guest list has been cut, and the couple has started asking family members for money. The bride's mother is paying for the dress and alterations, the groom's family covered the venue down payment, and the couple still hopes more relatives will contribute and that guest gifts will close the gap. The commenter called this "kind of crass."
A second comment in the same thread described a common pattern. People see the average wedding price, assume a $40,000 figure must be for luxury extras, and plan something "simple": a venue, food, drinks, appetizers, a photographer, a DJ, outfits, flowers, and a nice cake. Then they discover that this list is the $40,000 wedding.
Sethi Blames Parents for the Knowledge Gap
Sethi calls that comment "very apt" and says he mostly blames parents. In his view, many parents never talk to their children about money. What children hear is either "we can't afford it" or nothing at all, because the parents want to "let kids be kids." He suggests two alternatives. Take a child grocery shopping with a $100 budget and have them account for tax. Have an older child order for the family at a restaurant so they learn to include the tip.
Without that practice, Sethi says, people reach adulthood unaware of "phantom costs," the line items nobody thinks to budget for. His example was cutlery, which he says is expensive and which people don't even know to consider. He still holds the adult friend responsible. They are an adult, they should be responsible, and they are learning the lesson "in a very painful way."
A Transparent $80,000 Luxury-Market Wedding
The longest example is a TikTok video from a creator who spent a little under $80,000 on her wedding. She says couples in luxury markets will report similar numbers, and that she shares her figures because people have no idea how expensive weddings are. She works from a planning spreadsheet that lists every vendor and what they were paid. Her total covers everything from the engagement to the thank-you cards.
Sethi praises her diligence, especially one habit. When planning began, she opened a new credit card (a 3% cash-back card that she says is no longer worth getting) and put every wedding-related expense on it. That included the gas for a driving tour around California to look at venues. Because everything went through one card, she could see her true total. She warns that if you have a finite amount of money and don't track spending, it adds up quickly and you will likely exceed your limit.
Her total included an engagement party, an engagement photo shoot, and a nose job she got for the wedding. Sethi reacts with surprise at counting cosmetic surgery as a wedding expense, then says he is willing to "roll with the times." If someone wants a cosmetic procedure, that's fine, as long as it goes into the budget. He lists other costs that couples often leave out:
- bachelor and bachelorette parties
- gifts
- the groom's suit, since most people budget for the bride's dress but not the suit
- hotel blocks
Sinking Funds, Panic, and "Action Mode"
The creator says they did not go into debt. Before the engagement she kept a sinking fund, which she describes as money set aside for a large expense you can see coming. She notes that people in serious relationships usually know an engagement is likely. She and her fiancé had about $40,000 saved between their individual funds. When the actual vendor quotes arrived, with about eight months of planning left, she says she went into "a full blown panic spiral" and thought they couldn't afford the wedding.
Instead, they went into what she called "action mode." Sethi says this is what he likes most about the video. He thinks many people are passive about weddings and wait to see what happens. He wants them to be aggressive instead: track everything, set clear priorities, cut the guest list if needed, and make explicit trade-offs. He wants people to bring that energy to all major decisions. (He jokes that his own aggressive streak was winning a spelling bee before losing at the Sacramento level.)
Her action plan was demanding. She and her husband both took second jobs and worked 50 to 60 hours a week across their full-time and second jobs. She stresses that she wasn't earning steady income from social media then, so the money came purely from extra work.
Tipping and Other Costs That Sneak Up on You
The creator also mentions tipping. She says vendors are mostly small business owners, so they tipped every one. Sethi agrees that weddings have many "sneaky costs." He describes Indian weddings, where the father and sometimes the bride's brother carry thick rolls of cash to hand out to vendors. At his sisters' weddings, his father gave him the roll and told him to hand over a portion whenever a vendor needed to be paid.
The creator married in Napa Valley and was quoted $30,000 for catering alone. Sethi says he and his partner also considered Napa and found it beautiful, but venues there were "take it or leave it." They were planning a multicultural wedding with a horse entrance, and the Napa venues offered a classic "French white tablecloth" style. It was beautiful but not right for them, so they married somewhere else.
The creator adds that she got engaged a year and a half before the wedding. That meant she locked in 2022 pricing for a 2023 wedding. She estimates the same vendors in 2024 or 2025 would cost close to $100,000.
"Do I Regret It? Yes and No"
Asked whether she regrets it, the creator first says no, it was an amazing time. Then she adds that they have drained their accounts while trying to save for a house and pay off her student loans. Her final answer is "yes and no."
Sethi finds that ending interesting. His view is that if you plan properly for a major expense such as a wedding or a house, account for everything you can, and add a 15% buffer, you should be able to look back without major regrets. Some surprises will come up, but the buffer covers them, and what you remember is time with friends and family and beautiful photos. That is the outcome he wants people to aim for when using money well. He ends by congratulating the creator.
Three Cuts Nobody Noticed
The next story, from Reddit's r/Weddingsunder10k, goes the other way. The couple budgeted $11,000 and spent just under $7,200, which Sethi calls "quite rare." They made three cuts.
Flowers. The florist quoted $2,100. Instead, the couple went to a wholesale flower market the morning before the rehearsal, spent $180, and arranged everything that night with the poster's aunt. Three guests complimented the centerpieces, and one didn't believe the couple had made them.
DJ. The husband spent two evenings building a Spotify playlist organized by mood, and they rented a speaker setup for $95. Guests danced until 11:30, and the only complaint was that the music ended too early.
Cake. They had considered a $600 custom three-tier cake but chose a simpler $210 cake from a small nearby bakery. The baker added a small cutting cake for free because she liked their design. Guests finished it within 20 minutes and asked for the baker's name.
The poster also describes a turning point. Around the time they were finalizing vendors, they nearly let some savings disappear into a catering upgrade "nobody asked for." After that, they questioned every line item instead of accepting quotes. They wrote that none of it felt like cutting corners. It meant asking whether each item was really for them or "for some version of a wedding we'd been sold on." Once they worked that out, "the rest basically sorted itself."
Sethi calls it a great comment that shows the value of having a vision and taking an active role in major purchases. He predicts the couple will remember the trip to the flower market and arranging flowers with the aunt forever. A rich life, he says, doesn't only mean throwing money at a problem. Doing part of it yourself can be just as meaningful.
He then argues that the underlying issue is usually not how to spend less. Most people have never made a core list of what they care about and what they don't. Without that list, they end up with a "Frankenstein" wedding that doesn't feel personal, and they often fight about money along the way.
Wedding vs. Honeymoon: Sethi's Pushback on Compound-Interest Guilt
The last example is an Instagram post from Personal Finance Club, whose creator Sethi calls Jeremy and recommends following. The post compares two couples. Robert and Rachel spend $30,000 on their wedding, described as the average. Sam and Stephanie elope and invest the $30,000 instead. Thirty-two years later, the post says, the investment has grown to $261,000. Robert and Rachel need to work three more years to reach their retirement goal, while Sam and Stephanie can take a three-year honeymoon.
Sethi says the math is correct and that it is a clever way to show compound interest. His concern is that some followers take this kind of advice to an extreme. He thinks it teaches people that their main relationship with money should be saying no. He asks what could be more important than spending on a few key things in life. A couple may not want to spend $30,000, but the right answer might be $10,000, $5,000, or $18,000. The point is to ask what the money is for.
He believes many money messages make people feel guilty about spending, especially on weddings. He wants people to feel good about spending, whether the amount is $200, $5,000, or $500,000. People should understand compound interest and opportunity cost, he says, but the skill of spending on what you love is underrated. In his view, money problems are not only about math. How people spend on weddings, houses, vacations, and family shows how emotional money is.
The Question to Ask First: How Should It Feel?
Sethi finds it odd that couples spend months debating small details but rarely ask what he calls the one question that matters: what do we want our wedding to feel like? He says answering it makes many other decisions easier. If the goal is for guests to have fun, spend more on the DJ or choose a venue that stays open later. If the goal is to bring together friends from different parts of your life, spend more on the hotel experience or the venue and less on flowers. Without priorities, everything seems equally important, and "the forks feel just as important as the photographer."
His concrete advice is that before planning anything, each partner should write down the top three things they care about for the wedding and how they want it to feel, and then compare lists. He believes that one conversation will save money, stress, and many arguments.
The Wedding as a Couple's First Project
Sethi closes by putting the wedding in perspective. A wedding lasts one day for most people (he jokes that it's five days for Indians). What shapes a couple's financial life is how they handle money together. He describes the wedding as the output of two people collaborating on a shared vision, essentially their first major joint project. He believes couples who run that project well are likely to keep working that way for the rest of their lives, and couples who don't are likely to repeat that pattern too.
One couple in this video said that she and her husband both got second jobs just to pay for their wedding. Another couple spent just under $7,200. This is why wedding conversations are so fascinating. The real question is, are you spending intentionally or are you just getting swept up in everybody else's expectations?
Today, I want to break down what actually makes weddings memorable and where couples waste huge amounts of money without even realizing it. And maybe how to create a wedding that feels rich and personal and exciting to you. So let's dive in.
My friend told me her ceiling was $10k for her 150-person wedding. I warned her she wasn't being realistic and she showed me a venue that would cover everything for $5k.
What venue covers everything for $5k? You can't even get a room in a restaurant for $5k.
Of course, she was looking at the venue fee and nothing else. It was heartbreaking to watch the spark go out of her eye.
Hold on a second. Am I a bad person if sometimes I enjoy seeing the spark go out of somebody's eye? I'm like, that spark wasn't real. It was delusional. Now let's create a real spark. You need to know your numbers. Okay, I don't know. I'm a bad person, I think.
The budget crept up. It's $35k now. The guest list has been slashed and her and her fiancé have taken to begging family members for money. Mom's covering the dress and modifications. His family covered the venue down payment. They're still hoping for a few family members to pitch in. Hoping guest gifts will shrink it.
Kind of crass, don't you think? I don't know how you can go into the process without knowing. Or maybe people see Instagram influencer weddings, see the average price and assume $40k value must be for all the bells and whistles. Not for me. All I want is a venue, food, drinks, apps, photographer, DJ, bride/groom outfits, flowers and a nice cake. And then they realize that's the $40k wedding.
This is a very apt comment. Let me tell you who I blame in this situation. Parents. Because you never talk to your kids about money. Because the only thing you know about money is we can't afford it and I want to let kids be kids.
So you never even told them, "Hey, I'd like to go to the grocery store with you. We're going to spend $100. Here's our list. And I want you to learn how to account for things like taxes." And as they got older, you never took them to a restaurant and had them order for the family. Because then they would learn that they need to factor in tip as well.
No, you simply left them unaware to the rest of the world and then end up like this person's friend who doesn't know anything about phantom costs. They don't factor in the price of cutlery. Cutlery is expensive. You don't even know that. Is this person an adult? Yes. Should they be responsible? Yes. And they're learning their lesson. They're going to learn in a very painful way. Okay. What's next?
My wedding cost a little under $80,000. And if you asked anyone who got married in a luxury market, they will tell you their numbers were similar. The reason I shared that is because this is not normal. Weddings are so expensive and people have no idea how expensive they are. So I was just transparent about the pricing.
I'm looking at my wedding planning Excel sheet, which has all of my vendor prices, how much we paid for everything. I'm all about financial transparency. With that being said, I wanted to answer some FAQs coming up. So in that $80,000, I counted every single thing that we did for our wedding. From the second we got engaged until we sent out our thank you.
Hold on. I already love this video. And I love this person because you can tell that she is extremely diligent about her costs.
One thing that I did when we started planning our wedding is I got a new credit card. Back then there was a 3% card. Don't get this card. It's not good anymore. But back then it was great. And I put everything for our wedding on that card.
For example, not only the wedding costs, but when we took a driving tour around California, because we wanted to look at different venues, when I filled up the gas in the car, I used the wedding card. That allowed me to track how much the total wedding expenses were. If you are not tracking this and you have a finite amount of money, it's going to add up really quickly and it's very likely you go over the amount you set.
So that included our engagement party, engagement photo shoot, my nose job because I got a nose job for my wedding.
Hold on. Are we including nose jobs as part of wedding expenses now? Am I out of touch? What the f***? All right. Look, I'm willing to adapt and roll with the times. Somebody says I want to get a nose job. I want to get some type of cosmetic thing. God bless. Just factor it into the costs.
Other areas that people do not properly factor in for costs include bachelor and bachelorette parties, any gifts you might get, suits. Everybody factors in the bride's dress, but very few factor in the actual groom's suit and a variety of other things like that. You really need to put it all together.
Hotel blocks, et cetera. Did we go into debt? No. And let me tell you why. I had had a sinking fund for our wedding. So if you're in a serious relationship, you probably know that an engagement is coming. So a sinking fund is essentially money you put aside for a big event or something you see coming up.
My fiancé and I both had money saved from our individual sinking funds, which totaled about $40,000. Then we got our actual vendor quotes. And I'm not going to lie. I went into a full-blown panic spiral. This was with about eight months of wedding planning left to go. I was like, there's no way we're going to be able to afford to do this. But we got into action mode.
Another thing I love about this video is she is not passive. She's active. And I find that a lot of people with weddings are very passive, like, oh, we'll kind of just see what the world will possibly present to us today.
You all need to go on aggressive mode. Have any of you ever been aggressive about anything in your life? I don't know what it is. For me, it was, I'm aggressive about winning the spelling bee, which I did. But then I lost in Sacramento. That was another story. We're not going to get into that. What are you aggressive about?
I find very few people who are as aggressive as this creator who said, all right, we're going into action mode. We're going to track everything. We're going to create clear priorities. If we need to shrink the guest list, we'll shrink the guest list, et cetera. We're going to make trade-offs. That's that kind of energy I want you to bring to major decisions like this. Good work.
My husband and I both got second jobs. We were both working between 50 and 60 hours a week between our full-time jobs and our second jobs. I wasn't making a steady stream of income on social media at the time. So it was purely from working our ass off. Another thing I think a lot of people don't consider is you need to tip your vendors. They're all small business owners. So we tipped every single vendor.
There are a lot of sneaky costs with weddings. She's mentioning tipping. Indian people at their weddings have just rolls of cash. Usually it's the dad and maybe the brother of the bride and they just have thick amounts of cash they just hand out. I don't know if that happens here as much, but I know that for my sister's weddings, my dad said, hold this. And whenever I tell you, cut me part of the roll so I can give it to some vendor. Boom, that's how it works.
A lot of things that sneak up on you. And especially if you live in a luxury market. We got married in the Napa Valley. I was quoted $30,000 for catering. So it ain't cheap. It's not right.
We looked at Napa as well. It's beautiful. We found it to be basically they were like, take it or leave it. And we're like, dude, we're having a multicultural wedding. We're going to bring a horse. I'm coming in on a horse with a dhol behind it and all kinds of stuff. And they were like, nah. They were giving us sort of the French white tablecloth and we were like, this is beautiful, but it's not right for us. So we had our wedding elsewhere.
So it ain't cheap. It's not right. That's why I always talk about financial transparency with weddings on here. And keep in mind, I got engaged a year and a half before we actually got married. So I was actually honored into a lot of 2022 pricing when I got married in 2023. So I can promise you if I got the exact same vendors now in 2024, 2025, it would probably be closer to $100k.
No, I don't regret it. Yes, it was an amazing time. But now that we've drained our accounts and we're trying to save for a house and I'm trying to pay off my student loans, do I regret it? Yes and no.
It's interesting that she ends by saying, do we regret it? Yes and no. Because in my opinion, if you have properly planned for your major expense, wedding, house, whatever, you have accounted for as much as you can account for, you've also added a 15% buffer on top.
If you do that and you have a great time, as she said, it's the best day, I actually think that it's cool to look back and be like, no, we don't have any major regrets. We properly planned. Sure there were some things that came up, but we had a buffer for those unexpected things. And we look back and it was the time of our lives with our friends, our family, beautiful photos, et cetera.
That's what I want your outcome to be when it comes to using your money effectively. Great video. This is awesome. Big thumbs up to this creator. Congratulations on your wedding.
You know what's interesting? A lot of couples spend more time planning the wedding than planning the financial life that comes after the wedding. And I understand that weddings are exciting and they have a way of trapping you in this vortex of making decisions, but eventually the conversation shifts from how much should we spend on flowers to, hey, are we taking a honeymoon? Could one of us afford to take work off if we wanted to? Where do we want to live?
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Three things we cut that nobody at the wedding noticed. We had $11,000 budgeted going in. We ended up at just under $7,200. Wow, that's quite rare. Well done.
The three things that got us there was the florist, the DJ and the cake. Florals were quoted at $2,100. We hit a wholesale market the morning before the rehearsal, spent $180 and had my aunt help put everything together that night. Three guests complimented the centerpieces specifically. One asked who did them and didn't believe us when we said we did. LOL. That's cool.
No DJ either. My husband spent two evenings building a Spotify playlist organized by mood and we rented a speaker setup for $95. People danced until 11:30. The only complaint was that we ended the music too early.
Right around the time we were finalizing vendors, I realized I had some money saved up from rolling riches and nearly watched it disappear into a catering upgrade nobody asked for. That's when we started questioning every line item instead of just accepting quotes. Good. You want to be active with some of these things, not just passive.
For the cake, we had originally looked at a $600 custom three-tier situation, but we went into a small bakery nearby. $210 for something simpler. The baker threw in a small cutting cake for free because she liked the design we chose. Guests demolished it within 20 minutes and asked for the baker's name.
None of it felt like cutting corners. It just meant asking whether something was actually for us or for some version of a wedding we'd been sold on. Once we figured that out, the rest basically sorted itself.
This is awesome. What a great comment. This is embodying the idea that you've got to have a vision for what you want. And when you take an active role, especially in these major purchases in life, like buying a house, having a wedding, retirement, then you can often decide what is important to you.
I honestly think they're going to remember going and doing the floral market and arranging it with their aunt forever. That's incredibly meaningful. Remember a rich life does not only have to mean throwing money at the problem. That can help, but there are so many ways to create a rich life. You doing part of it yourself. Great work. I love that they are sharing this.
Many couples end up fighting about money when it comes to their wedding. A lot of people deep down think the goal is to figure out how to spend less on a wedding, but that's usually not the real problem. The real problem is that most people have never set up a core list of what they really care about and what they don't care about. And they end up with this Frankenstein of a wedding that's not personal to them.
I want you to learn how to refine what you care about and what you don't, whether it's with a wedding, vacation, your house, your car, so that you can feel super confident. And inside my Money Coaching program, I will show you how to build that very system. So when you do spend extravagantly on something you care about, it actually feels exciting instead of stressful.
If your dream is an amazing wedding weekend, great. Let's build a system that helps you get that. If your goal is to take a trip and to be able to see something miraculous and beautiful, I'm going to show you how to do that too. Join my Money Coaching program today. You can scan the QR code on screen or click the link below to get started. I will see you inside.
Wedding versus honeymoon. This is from Personal Finance Club. I like his stuff a lot. Highly recommend following him. Robert and Rachel and Sam and Stephanie get married. Robert and Rachel spend $30k on their wedding, which is the average. And then he's saying 32 years later, that couple needs to work for three more years to reach their retirement goal.
Sam and Stephanie elope and invest $30k. The investment has grown to $261,000 and they take a three-year honeymoon. Come on, man. It's fair. The math is correct, but I do think there are people who follow this advice that Jeremy recommends and they take it to an extreme because this is essentially teaching people that the primary relationship that you should have with money is saying no.
What could be more important than a few key things in your life? So you may not want to spend $30k on a wedding, but is it $10k, $5k, $18k? What is the money for? I don't mind illustrating the power of compound interest. I think this is a clever way to do it, but I do think there are so many messages around money that make people feel guilty for spending, especially around weddings.
I don't want you to feel guilty. I actually want you to feel really good about spending, whether it's $200, $5,000, $500,000. And while you should understand compound interest and opportunity costs, I think that we understate the skill of spending on the things you love.
So many people think money problems are just about math. And then you watch how people actually spend their money around weddings, houses, vacations, family, and you realize that money is deeply emotional and involves deep money psychology for us. Have you ever wondered why you do the
Things you do with money? Have you ever wanted to improve your relationship with money? Subscribe to this channel because that's what I talk about here. I'm going to show you how to be more confident and competent with money. So click subscribe.
What's weird, couples will spend six months debating some tiny esoteric wedding detail, but they rarely stop to ask the one question that matters. What do we want our wedding to feel like? That's the question.
Once you answer that, a lot of other decisions become much, much easier. So for example, if you want people to be having fun, then you might be spending more on the DJ or you might be getting a venue that stays open later. If you care about having your friends together and meeting each other from different parts of your life, maybe you're going to spend more on the hotel experience or the venue, less on the flowers.
But most people don't think about what's important and what's not. Everything is equal to them. And suddenly the forks feel just as important as the photographer. So before planning anything, I would literally encourage you to write down the top three things you care about for your wedding and the way you want to feel. Compare those lists and that one conversation will save you money, stress, and tons of arguments.
Remember that a wedding is five days. Oh wait, that's just for Indians. A wedding for most people is one day. How you handle your money together is actually what shapes your financial life. So the wedding itself is just the output of the two of you collaborating and talking and creating this vision together. It's like you basically created a project together. It's your first major project.
The couples who effectively run this project together, they're very likely to do it for the rest of their lives. The couples who don't? Same thing.
If you want help figuring out how to actually build a rich life together and thrive, watch my video called The Secret to Financial Success as a Couple next.
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