Planning an Inexpensive Wedding in an Expensive City

Many couples get engaged during the holidays and begin planning their wedding for the following spring or summer. The Great Recession has made it very difficult to pay for a traditional white wedding. Arash Moussavian and I got engaged on New Year’s Day 2009, which was a few months after the stock market crash. To compound the situation he was in school full time getting an LLM degree at UC Berkeley and so he was unemployed, and I had just received my lay off notice. This is how I planned our wedding.

The San Francisco Park and Recreation department rents outdoor space for weddings in front of the Legion of Honor museum, and under the huge beautiful rotunda at the Palace of Fine Arts, and Shakespeare’s Garden in Golden Gate Park. In 2009 the rental fee was $750 for four hours which is cheap in San Francisco. However, at that time the rotunda was closed for renovations and the other locations are outdoors. You’re not allowed to install a canopy in case it rains. That scared me off. Also, they won’t allow loud music, not even for “The Wedding March” song which is an absolute must have.

I found a church that allows interfaith ceremonies and charged only $350 for their rental fee, which is really cheap in San Francisco. It’s called the The St. Francis Lutheran Church and it’s in the Castro District. It’s located at 152 Church Street in San Francisco. Phone: (415) 621-2635. They have no parking at all , but it’s located close to the Muni train stop in the Castro district, which connects to the BART train stations, which connect to the SFO airport.
Officiating Minister Services for an interfaith ceremony cost an additional $350. The church has a small reception hall that fits approximately 25 people. It was too small for us and so I didn’t ask about the rental fee.

The Safeway across the street from the church sells traditional wedding cakes. Mine was two tiers high with ivory frosting and white flowers and cost $75.

Beware that some reception venues will allow only certain caterers to deliver food there. It’s a scam. The caterers on their list are paying them under the table as a marketing fee. For example, I found nice venues in the Presidio but they had a list of caterers and their minimums were really high. I think the least expensive one charged a minimum of $2,500.00. Arash and I decided on Boston Market because they offered full catering services with porcelain dishes and stainless steel silverware for about $25 per person.

There is a huge inventory of wedding dresses on eBay. I bought mine there. It was very formal with a cathedral style train. Unfortunately, the original owner had altered the bust and waist and it didn’t fit me. I took it to a professional tailor to try to save it but it couldn’t be saved. Eventually I listed it on eBay with the accurate measurements and I sold it. You can rent a wedding dress from a local boutique but it’s expensive. They charge a rental fee, a deposit, plus a dry cleaning fee which is between $100 to $150.

I emailed our wedding invitations to our guests instead of ordering custom stationary. It worked, and our guests sent it to their guests and so it worked better than I expected. With that said, anytime one broadcasts an email it could be blocked by a spam filter.

A homemade bridal bouquet costs about $30. Buy a dozen white roses with baby’s breath and green sprigs, and tie them together with ivory ribbon. Store it in a vase on the milk shelf in your refrigerator.

I saved money on bridesmaid’s dresses by shopping at a department store instead of a bridal shop. They were nice party dresses that my bridesmaids could wear again at other events in the future, not traditional bridesmaids dresses which tend to be dowdy anyway.

The right music is really important. I bought a CD of traditional wedding songs by The Knot. Luckily, several of Arash’s friends from high school are professional musicians and a few of them volunteered to play at our wedding. Originally I wanted to hire an organist to play the huge pipe organ in the church, but he wanted almost $400.

You will need a separate dress for the wedding reception so that you can dance and eat. Wear comfortable shoes! Traditionally the bride dances with her husband and her father, which will likely run for over seven minutes, and so if you’re wearing uncomfortable heels than it will be painful and awkward.

We decided on buying $10 bottles of wine and let our guests serve themselves instead of hiring a bartender. You can buy wine directly from the wineries by ordering it online or visiting them if they happen to be local.

Options for an engagement ring:

Used rings at consignment stores and estate shops can be great deals if they are good quality. Make sure to hire your own appraiser; don’t rely on the salesperson’s information about the ring. For example, a white gold ring may be nickel. The diamond could be a really great fake, such as Moissanite.

Antique rings that have a cheap center stone could have potential. Hire a jeweler to remove the center stone and then replace it with cubic zirconium or Moissanite. Wikipedia has an article about Moissanite.

During 2009 Macy’s had large sales on jewelry for 70% off and they also offered an interest free lay-away plan. However, their diamond engagement rings were not included in the sale, and the federal government boycotted red rubies because of the suppliers’ mining practices. Arash and I picked out a simple blue sapphire ring that was $800.

We also found great deals on Overstock.com and ebay.com but we felt uncomfortable about buying jewelry on the Internet.

I would love to say that our wedding went beautifully but the truth is that Arash and I didn’t get married. If I tell the whole story here than my editors will delete it. The shortest most benign version I can create is that we were together from 2007 to 2011 and I poured my heart and soul into our relationship because I really wanted it to work, and he fought it the entire time because I didn’t meet his income criteria. He had hoped to find a rich woman. To compound the situation, during the first three months of our relationship he gossiped about me to his mom and his ex girlfriend Tara. I hadn’t met them yet and they were already trying to break us up.

Someone kept texting and calling him on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings and he said it was his mom and his ex girlfriend. Eventually I decided to look at his email account. I cracked the password and discovered that two months into our relationship he met six women on Craigslist and they wrote intimate emails to each other for several months. He took Tatiana out for dinner and to the symphony after we had been together for nine months.

By the time I discovered what he had been doing we had already been engaged for six months. I thought that we could overcome our problems and I kept trying as hard as I could. He quit couples counseling after two sessions and broke up with me. We didn’t talk to each other for two months. After he dated a bunch of calculating low lifes he came back and promised to change.

I was very patient about the whole thing. However, in November 2010 he got a good job at a law firm and within two weeks a woman named Maria Toyofuku began posting comments on his Facebook wall constantly, sometimes three per day. I assumed that she didn’t know that he was in a relationship and so I very politely told her. I didn’t mention it to Arash. A few months later he broke up with me under a transparently false pretense, and within a month he told his relatives that he was dating Maria. A few months later he moved into her house.


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