We Got My Fiance's Wedding Dress for $10 Yesterday

Weddings are a scam, the average wedding in the United States costs $27,000, and they are incredibly stressful to the people that plan them. That is part of the reason why Jessica and I have been engaged so long. We’re totally ready to get married right now, but it is just a pain in the ass to plan it, and we have a 1 year old son together which makes things even more complicated.

So after many long conversations about how we’re going to get married, we decided to go a non-traditional route. We’re going to take that money that we would have spent on a traditional wedding and use it for a trip for the three of us to go to Costa Rica and have a beautiful elopement in the jungle.

There are a few reasons for this, one is that our friends are spread out all over the country, as she has moved from Seattle, to Korea, to San Diego, and back to Seattle over the past few years, and I have moved from Oakland to New York back to Oakland to Colorado to San Diego and now Seattle. We don’t have deep roots anywhere, except with each other and with our son.

So if we’re going to have to invite people from all over the world to come to our wedding in Seattle, where we live now, we don’t want to be disappointed when they can’t come, or even make them feel like they have to come at all.

Southwest and Alaska airlines are now offering cheap flights to Costa Rica, and there are tons of places that offer beautiful looking elopement packages for a small fraction of what it costs to get married in the USA, where basically every wedding vendor is ripping you off by playing on your culturally implanted pre-conceived notions of what a wedding is supposed to be and using that to charge 10x what it would normally cost for a party of the same size.

There is also the diamond industry, which is another giant scam where one corporation intentionally decreases the size of available diamonds world-wide in order to jack up the prices of jewelry, when in fact diamonds are abundant on Earth. I proposed with matching rose gold wedding bands, which is also opposite of the normal route, and we’ll be going with a different stone for the engagement ring.

We went to a rummage sale at a high school yesterday, which is basically a giant garage sale where people from all over the neighborhood donate stuff they don’t need anymore and it is all staged and sold by volunteers at the school, and the money is donated to the Rotary Club. There is a ton of stuff there for extremely cheap. We were there looking for a bookshelf and whatever other cool stuff we could find.

The Rummage Sale, you can find anything and everything in those piles

We found our bookshelf, but we also found something amazing that we did not expect. The wedding dress has been a challenge for us as well, because as soon as you start looking at wedding dresses here in America you start to fall into the extremely over-priced because it is for a wedding area again, and we’re trying to avoid that. I believe the average wedding dress here is over $1,000.

What we happened to find was a beautiful looking dress, marked for $10. We were skeptical at first, simply because it was so cheap. But then when you think about it, people only wear their wedding dress one time, then it pretty much loses all it’s value, so why wouldn’t it end up here at this rummage sale for $10? So Jessica tried it on in a high school girls bathroom.

She looked beautiful in it, so there we had it, a wedding dress for less than 1% of what most people would expect to spend, and we were ecstatic! It’s a beautiful dress, and because it’s so cheap, Jessica doesn’t have any problems with altering it or adding rhinestones and stuff to it to make it even more beautiful. It’s going to be the perfect dress for our tropical elopement.

Now that we have the dress, this feels so real, and like it’s really going to happen soon. Now I just need to talk to my manager and figure out which two weeks I can take off of work, book our tickets on Alaska or Southwest (under $600 round trip!) and book our tropical paradise elopement venue. We’re going to be have the alternative wedding of our dreams, a beautiful trip that we’ll never forget, and doing it all for a small fraction of what a stressful typical American wedding would cost.

Nothing against people who have regular weddings, but I’m so stoked for our alternative wedding and for doing things how we want to do them, even if it’s different than what is expected of us. I feel smart, happy, and empowered about this.

Did I mention that we're stoked?