CAD or USD?
USSD
I’m going to try to answer for the US. $10k CAD would be about $7,150 USD.
Round trip tickets to China - $4000 (this was the cheapest I could find, you could easily blow the whole budget just on flights if you wanted)
Day expenses for two people for a week in China - $840 (low end of this recommendation)
So you’re left with $2310 for the wedding. You could easily spend all of that on just the venue or the dress or the caterer or the florist or whatever. At that price you’re basically not going to be able to do any of the normal wedding stuff for a wedding with guests. Do some people go as cheap as possible and book a $100 venue and wear casual clothes and feed everyone food they made themselves with some family help? Yeah, but it’s far from the norm. At that price point, I’d probably spend most of it on the clothes or simply pocket it for the China trip and get married at the courthouse with a couple witnesses.
get married at the courthouse with a couple witnesses.
Yeah that’d be my plan
It makes more and more sense every year. Still, the average cost for a wedding in the US was $38,700 as of 2019
That’s gotta be one of those average vs median type things, yeah? Both because of rampant inequality and because it can’t be normally distributed anyway if nobody’s having negative cost weddings.
(Also I suspect this article is actually a submarine by the wedding industry to normalize very expensive weddings.)
Yeah, I used to work at a resort for wealthy people and they would do shit like, “instead of paying you to rent your entire hotel out for the day, we’re going to pay to refurbish every floor in the building with period accurate wood and you’ll let us use it for free.” And I’m sure there were tax implications to that. But the outliers in the US are huge outliers. Just hundreds of thousands of dollars like it’s nothing.
Damn that’s crazy, but yeah here too probably
This is a surprising estimate based on my recent experience.
Flights - Maybe this some wild American thing? From the UK, Hainan Airline, I spent £750 total on a round trip flight to Beijing.
Day expenses - For £30/day I stayed in pretty upmarket hotels, breakfast and free drink included. A luxury sushi dinner cost £9, but if you were eating cheaply you could eat out all day whatever you want for ~£10/person/day (much less so if you’ll just eat cantina food and steamed buns). Add on maybe £10 for a wealth of train rides/experiences (Great wall was £4. Mao Mausoleum was free, metro is pennies, etc.).
So all included, by my experience, that’d be 30 * 7 + 20 * 2 people * 7 = 490 GBP/week for two people, or $650 USD. And this is middle of Beijing, presumably one of the most expensive places. And I did not hold back on enjoying myself.
But then - I also deliberately avoid any travel agents, any package deals, theme parks, tourist experiences, etc. So maybe that plays a big part in the discrepancy.
So it answer for someone in the UK - then £1500/3k CAD for two peoples’ flights, and £500/1k CAD for a week for two people having a pretty good time. Leaves £3k/6k CAD for a wedding. Perfect balance.
I feel like 10 years ago I paid around 400-600USD for round trip flight to Phnom Penh, that had a layover in Shanghai. Flights right are are obviously going to be more expensive, but I think due to fuel shortages it’s especially bad.
Flight prices have barely changed here. No idea why, because fuel prices have shot up, but flights not affected.
Looked up flights just now - Round Trip London - Beijing less than £600. So significantly cheaper than when I went, somehow.
Looking into it further, it seems like the price for the plane tickets drops down to about $800/person if you leave from the west coast instead of the east coast. So the further east you go in the US, the harder it will be to stay on budget to get to Liaoning specifically.
omg lol that’s so funny
Wasting a month’s salary on suit/dress you’ll wear once is not on the plan obviously
