Here’s How I Pulled Off a 90-Person NYC Wedding for $30k

In celebration of my three-year wedding anniversary

Weddings are expensive. They’re joyful and sacred and wonderful celebrations of potentially the most important decision you’re ever going to make, but really, at the end of the day, they’re expensive.

My husband and I got engaged around four years ago. I was a nanny fresh out of an MFA program. He was working at a food tech company. And my mom let me know that my dad had set aside an amount of money for my wedding when he passed about a decade earlier. We decided, before we knew the amount, that would be how much we’d spend. We weren’t earning enough to justify taking on costs on our own, and we felt really inspired by the generosity of the gift. So there it was: our $30,000 budget.

This is the breakdown of how we took that money and threw a wedding that felt 100% like us, involved nearly 100 people we love, and left us feeling like there wasn’t anything we’d change. This is not a line-by-line breakdown; more of a peak into how a little creativity and some ingenuity can get you a long way.