Elopement vs Wedding: Planning Your Perfect Day

Neither is necessarily better or worse than the other in every case or for everyone.

So, try not to get hung up on choosing a winner when comparing eloping vs a wedding.

Instead, it’s more helpful to focus on the differences that will most likely make the largest difference in your own personal case.

And we know you aren’t a wedding professional like we are, so we don’t expect you to know what those are right off the bat.

To help you, we’re going to go through a few of the big ones now.

Guests

The guest list is probably the most significant difference between eloping vs a wedding, and it’s pretty easy to understand why.

In the old days, couples who eloped typically did so alone, often having only an officiant and perhaps 10 or fewer close friends present as witnesses.

This was in contrast to a traditional wedding, in which it was the custom until relatively recently to invite every single person in your entire extended family, plus any friends you didn’t want to upset by leaving them out.

These days, both elopements and weddings are usually very different than how they used to be.

However, the general rule of having far fewer guests at an elopement still stands, and you can expect the guest list at an elopement to be around half the length of a wedding’s.

You’re still getting married either way, of course.

So, it’s not like either is more or less legitimate (certainly not in the eyes of the cold and impersonal state).

You’re essentially just choosing the number of guests and, possibly, the level of traditional formality you want to have.

However, that choice affects more than just the number of invitations you need to send out, such as…

Venue

This relates to the guest list because some venues are better suited to hosting large or small gatherings.

If you’ve got a fairly extensive guest list, then you won’t want a venue that can only accommodate 50 guests.

Likewise, if you’re only inviting 50 people, there’s no need to spend extra money renting out a more expensive venue that’s built to host 300.

You certainly can do that if you want to, but there’s no real reason to.

In general, there is a significant difference in the number of invitees when eloping vs a wedding.

And speaking of budgeting, we’ve got a word or two to say on that subject as well…

Note: Check out this other article we posted about scenic outdoor venues in this area. 😉

You May Have More Options Than You Think

If you want to have a traditional Catholic ceremony with a priest, both of your entire extended families in attendance, stained glass, and all the traditional bells and whistles, you can pretty much only do all that by having a traditional wedding in a Catholic church or cathedral.

However, if you don’t necessarily feel that you need something like that, you can elope and secure a venue for yourselves that you might not necessarily need to wait as long or pay as much for.

Elopements used to be effectively a way to run away and get married to someone your parents disapproved of.

That’s how it started, but it’s a lot more common and socially acceptable now to choose eloping vs a wedding.

And since it’s already a less traditional way to do things, you don’t necessarily have the same pressure to keep all of the old traditions.

Instead of getting married in a church that you’ve never actually attended as a member, you can have your ceremony in a clearing in the woods or even on a golf course.

You could even do it at an arcade if you wanted to.

It’s really up to you.

Budget

Ok, let’s get one thing straight right from the jump: You do not need to and should not use your wedding as an excuse to plunge yourselves into financial ruin.

According to most reliable estimates, the average cost of a wedding in this country is around $60,000. That’s almost identical to the average annual income for a 33-year-old American.

Yes, we do understand that averages can be skewed heavily by a tiny number of people making or spending unholy amounts of money while most everyone else has far less.

However, even in averages, you simply don’t get those kinds of numbers without a large number of people behaving outrageously.

And you don’t have to be one of those people.

If You Have to Spend, Why Not Spend On Your Honeymoon?

What could the two of you do with $60,000?

Seriously.

That’s the down payment on a decent house in most of the country.

Heck, if you went to another country as soon as you got married, you could realistically coast for about a year or two (depending on the country) without even working.

Actually, you don’t even need to leave the US to do that.

You could buy a big ol’ RV and just adventure across the US and Canada for the same amount of time.

And if you’re really feeling like being part of the solution, you can put the down payment on a few acres of land in some rural part of the US, build a tiny home, and spend the next few years homesteading.

Alternatively, if you just happen to have $60k burning a hole in your pockets, you could probably dumb it into a low-fee index fund and, after 30 years, it might be worth $1 million or something.

We don’t know, we’re not financial advisors.

The point here is that there is so much more that you can do with 60 racks than blow it all on a single party that only lasts one day.

While you will undoubtedly have to spend some amount of money, whatever you’re paying for your venue should account for at least half of whatever you spend.

You should not go crazy with expenses beyond that, and if you opt for eloping vs a wedding, you won’t have to.

To be fair, though, even if you decide to have a very traditional wedding, you shouldn’t break the bank any more than people did 200 years ago when they got married the traditional way.

These two people are stock photo models, but a real couple could very realistically live in that camper vehicle and adventure across the US for more than a year on 60 grand.