Budget...

Well, if you haven't heard these are hard times we're living in. Wedding budgets are becoming slimmer and slimmer, and that is how I believe it should be. When I began thinking about this whole budget thing, I thought about what the initial max had been and then wondered what the average wedding in the US is and again how many starving children could be fed for a year on the average amount of money that people spend on this one day. I did a lil' research, so here's a little information for you all.

• The average US wedding costs $20,398 according to costofwedding.com. 

• Smartmoney.com puts the number between $21,000 and $24,000.  

• The knot says that it’s more like 27,000. 

If we average all of these sources we get about $22,500 for the average American wedding.

The average cost in my zip code is an astronomical $42,836! Whereas in my mom's zip code it's $24,682. We only live 28 miles apart. Just for funzies I did a little research on some of the poorest zip codes in the country and compared their average wedding cost.

• It's Buffalo County, South Dakota according to wikipedia where the income is the lowest: $5,213 per capita ($12,692 median household). There the average there wedding costs $3,468. 

• The median household income from what I can tell is around $50,000 in the US (and dropping). 

For those who are keeping up, (according to the math of this humble liberal arts major) the average American wedding costs between 25% and 45% of the household income. Wow. Just wow. According to the book What We Could Have Done With the Money it costs $2,160 to feed a starving child from birth to eighteen years of age. Feed Just One, World Food Programme and others say it costs even less and, get this,

511 starving children could eat for a year on the price of the average American wedding.

Gross. I will not even make a guess on how many children could be fed if all the people that end up spending gobs of money on divorce had not been married in the first place. Phew, that was a Debbie Downer kind of post. More positivity next time, I promise. Till then, I love my fiance and cannot wait to marry him! :)