How Much Would The "Father of the Bride" Wedding Cost Today?
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Here's a riddle for you. What's more than 30 years old, makes me cry repeatedly, and involves a beautiful love story? Not Meatloaf's greatest hit, I Would Do Anything for Love. I would do it.

I'm talking about Father of the Bride, a cult classic rom-com about a dad learning to let go of his daughter as she gets married to a nice guy she met while studying abroad. So what is it that gets me all choked up? Well, naturally, it's the amount of money they spent on that freaking wedding. So in this video, we're going to break down exactly how much they spent on the wedding, what it would cost today, plus how you may be sabotaging your finances just like George Banks did in the movie. Before we dive in, be sure to hit that like and subscribe button. And if you share it, well, that's just icing on the wedding cake.

Sounds scrumptious. All right, for those of you who have been living under a rock in my Gen Z squad, Father of the Bride was a movie that came out back in 1991. Steve Martin, who you might now recognize as Selena Gomez's co-star in Only Murders in the Building, plays a character named George Banks. And like all good Georges, he was just a well-meaning, budget-conscious dad who loves his daughter and wants her to have a lovely wedding. However, without a plan and clear communication, the expenses pile up until it becomes kind of a nightmare. So how much was this nightmare? Well, let's start...

Big picture. George is told that the cost from everything from flowers to the limo would be $250 per head. $250 a head means for the four of us to attend this wedding in our own home will cost $1,000. Now, given the initial headcount of 572 people, that would have been $143,000 back in 1991, mind you. Luckily, after cutting down the list, remembering that some people on the list

died and considering asking people not to eat, they wound up with 200 cars that actually showed up. Now let's assume on average, there was two and a half people per car. That would mean they got the list down to around 500 people. So again, at 250 bucks per head, that works out to $125,000. That's better, I guess? - Not really. - But as far as expenses go, that really was just the beginning. Enter Frunk.

The high-end wedding coordinator with a delightful yet difficult to understand accent played by the brilliant Martin Short. Old Frank got a 15% cut of the total cost of the wedding. So based on the $125,000 price point, George Banks would have paid $18,750.

plus an hourly fee. Now add a conservative 25 bucks an hour for both Frank and his assistant Howard for about 100 hours of work, that comes out to $5,000. Add that to the base fee and you get $23,750 for the wedding coordinator tacked on to our total.

Next up, George graciously pays for nine round-trip tickets from Denmark to Los Angeles to bring in some of the groom's family members. At $1,500 a pop, that's another $13,500. Then there's the wedding ceremony itself. Now, it's hard to say how much they paid for the church, the string trio, and the rings, but I think it's safe to assume it wasn't free. So let's take some creative liberties and make an estimation using today's price adjusted for inflation.

One estimate for the church would be about $440 in the 90s. A typical string trio would have been $300, and the rings would have been around $350. That's another $1,090 added to the total. Now, given how things are adding up, George hits a breaking point and decides to scamp on having four valet attendants at the reception and instead...

gets two. At $25 an hour for a six-hour event, he would have paid $300 for the two valets. But here's the problem. He ends up missing most of the wedding while he and his nine-year-old son move cars off of the street before they get shut down by the fire marshal. Just have them off the street within the next 30 minutes. We'll do, sir. We'll take care of it. You're not to worry, okay? Now, I'm all for saving money. And as we can see already, there are plenty of areas to cut back on. But

But this cut cost him the ability to enjoy almost all of the wedding over 300 bucks. Not the best ROI here, George. But I do have to give George some credit when it comes to the expense of his suit. He tried to save money by wearing his old tux from 1975. And it fit like a glove that was much too small. Not unlike the suit jacket I'm wearing right now. So on his mission to buy a budget-friendly suit, he gets scammed on a fake Armani suit thinking he got the deal of a lifetime. Armani doesn't make a blue tuxedo.

Armani don't also make polyester. Now, if we assume it's 10% of the real deal, he still spent a couple of hundred bucks on a fake Armani blue polyester suit. Next expense every good wedding has, the cost of bail. You see, George lands himself in jail after a meltdown in a grocery store over the scam that is the ratio of hot dogs to buns, which I agree needs to be addressed. Why? Why do we have eight hot dogs, but 12 buns? I'm with George on this one. I'm not

paying for one more thing I don't need. Problem is, he had a meltdown, gets in jail, and his wife has to bail him out, which we estimated at about $430. And whether you're saving money for a wedding, bail, or something in between, it's always great to have a little help along the way. And that brings us to one of today's sponsors, Laurel Road. Laurel Road is an awesome online bank with a great high-yield savings account with a competitive interest rate.

So if you want to feel like you're living a life of luxury, and we're talking about the luxury of not needing to freak out about four superfluous hot dog buns like George Banks, be sure to check them out. On top of that interest rate, they've got great perks like no annoying maintenance fees, no minimum balance required to open an account, and your deposits are FDIC insured.

So make the most of your savings by heading to laurelroad.com slash george or just click the link in the description below. And while you're clicking on links, be sure to check out Tello, another sponsor of today's episode. Tello is a quick and easy way to save big on your cell phone plan. And in case you're planning a big vacation, well, great news. Tello has you covered. No matter where your adventure takes you from the Redneck Riviera to the actual Riviera, you can stay connected in over 250 countries with Tello's brand new and affordable international roaming.

My family uses Tello and loves it because they offer plans as low as $5 all the way up to a whopping $25 for unlimited everything. And best of all, their plans are flexible with no contracts. So go to tello.com slash george to get an extra $5 off your unlimited data plan or click the link in the description below. All right, back to the cost of Father of the Bride. There's one more expense that we can't forget, and that is the Krups Type 964 cappuccino machine that George gifts to Happy Couple.

To figure out what this would actually cost, a guy on our team reached out to Krups USA, finding that not only do they have a delightful customer service team, but the Krups Type 964 would have been 60 bucks back in the 90s. God bless. Simpler times. All right, time for the totals. The father of the bride wedding in 1991 would have cost...

$164,330. And before you think, that's not so bad, well, here's some context. The median sales price for a home in the US in 1991 was $120,000. So basically, think about your wedding costing more than your house. And if that doesn't make you angry, if you had invested that amount over the last 33 years instead, it would have grown to over $5 million. Hope you like the wedding. Why not just throw your money directly down the toilet?

All right, let's look at how much this wedding would cost today in the year 2024, year of our Lord. According to The Knot, the average cost per head in 2023 was $304. However, the average wedding doesn't involve an entire home overhaul, ice sculptures, and live swans like the movie. So after a lot of research and a lot of nerdy math, we found that the cost for the father of the bride wedding today would be $616 per head for a grand total of...

$308,000. Yikes. Now, what makes all this worse is that our boy George went into debt to pay for the wedding. Because as the true fans know, in Father of the Bride Part 2, George says, I'm not going into Hawk to give Annie a baby shower. I just finished paying for the wedding. Now, a little side note for you word nerds out there. Hawk.

Hock is an old-timey word for debt, but originally it derives from the old Dutch term for prison. Yeah, even back then, going into debt was like a prison sentence. Hope the swans were worth it, George. Now, all in all, it's pretty clear that this wedding was unnecessarily expensive. So I'm actually on team George on this one, if that's a shock to any of you.

Now, you may not be planning a wedding, but you probably have other financial goals or aspirations like getting out of debt or trying to save up a down payment for a house or taking a vacation to an alpaca sanctuary in the Andes. And if you aren't clear about where you want to be and setting tangible goals, you probably aren't going to get there. And planning for a big expense, it can feel difficult and overwhelming. So let's talk through some quick, easy ways to make sure that you're aiming for and achieving your money goals. Let's say you want to take a vacation because of course you do. Who doesn't?

First, you gotta know what the goal is. You need to be specific and make sure that anyone else involved is on the same page. You may want to take a three-week European vacation, but at 5,000 per person, it's a bit much. However, you can afford a week in Charleston to the tune of 1,000 per person. And yes, it's a compromise, but Charleston is still great. You still get some cobblestone streets, some centuries-old architecture. I mean, some even call it Europe of the South, I think. No one has ever said that.

Similarly, in Father of the Bride, if they had a conversation about a budget, they could have settled on a wedding that was still amazing, but reasonable. All right, after you solidified what the goal is, you need to know what the timeframe is for achieving that goal. So in the movie, they only have five months, which is not a lot of time to plan for a wedding of this magnitude. So if you find yourself in a tight timeframe, that is all the more reason to reconsider how much you're spending. Let's say you wanna go to Charleston in six months.

Well, knowing your timeframe is going to help you break up that goal into actionable steps. So if it's a thousand bucks to go to Charleston and you have six months to save, then you know you need to save about 170 bucks each month into what I call a sinking fund. So now you have a plan and you can track that plan in EveryDollar, which is my favorite budgeting app. And it's the same way that I track all of my savings goals. This makes a huge difference. So be sure to check it out at EveryDollar.com slash George or the link in the description.

Now, unfortunately, in the movie, they didn't start with a plan. And every time a new expense came up or a decision had to be made, they based it off of emotions, which let me tell you, there's a lot of emotions when it comes to wedding planning.

There was no baseline or budget to weigh whether the new expense was worth it. So they just tacked it on and hoped for the best. They just yellowed that thing. And I get it. This is not all financial. There's memories to be made here. But I don't want this memory to be a mountain of debt and a rough financial start for your marriage or for your family. So here's the bottom line. Approaching big ticket items with a plan makes all the difference. When you start breaking it down, sometimes you figure out that it doesn't need to be as expensive anymore.

as you thought. In fact, in terms of weddings, I can attest that you could have a great wedding on the cheap. How cheap are we talking about? How about free? Don't believe me? Well, check out this video on how I got a free wedding. Mostly. You'll see. Check it out or click the link in the description below. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.