Anyone who has planned or will plan a wedding can empathize with the horror of seeing expenses creep over their budget. The Knot revealed that the average 2013 wedding cost $29,858 -- and that's not including honeymoon expenses. In my hometown, Los Angeles, the average cost to host a wedding is $38,735 -- and that only makes it the 11th most expensive place in the U.S. to get married, according to the survey. My wedding isn't until November 2015, but my fiance and I mapped out a 27-month engagement that would give us time save money for the event. Like any newly engaged couple, we asked ourselves how much we were willing to spend on our big day, but we knew that our large Filipino families would expect us to extend invitations to distant relatives and friends with six degrees of separation from us. My mom's contribution to the list of guests we needed to invite, for example, included one of her high school friends, that friend's entire family and her friend's daughter's long-term boyfriend. Some friends recommended that we dodge a traditional wedding by eloping on the cheap. This would save us from spending the equivalent of a home down payment on a single night, but we knew the importance of tempering family cultural expectations with our modest budget.
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