Lavish Wedding
Should
you have a lavish wedding? To answer that question, let's first define "lavish wedding". The average
wedding in the US costs around $30,000, so anything above that could be considered "lavish" by some,
but not in Hollywood.In Hollywood, a lavish wedding would only start with the $1 million Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt spent on their 2000 nuptial, long before Angelina Jolie entered their picture.
Eddie Murphy spent about double that in today's dollars for his then extravagant wedding to Nicole Mitchell in 1993, perhaps after picking up a few tips from attending Elizabeth Taylor's $2 million wedding in 1991 to Larry Fortensky - her eighth marriage to her seventh husband (she married Richard Burton twice).
A memorable wedding in the UK's recent memory is the one that cost Paul McCartney $3 million to marry Heather Mills in 2002, a little less than what Liza Minnelli and David Gest spent back across the pond for their nuptial the same year, complete with a 60-piece orchestra and a 12-tier cake (how all of these marriages ended up will the discussed in the next page).
Not to be outdone, Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar's wedding started in the UK and finished half way around the world in Nayar's India. The price tag? $4 million, although most of it was covered by tabloids' photo royalties.
But even that pales next to the most lavish wedding in recent years. In 2004, the Indian steel king Lakshmi Mittal hosted a 5-day extravaganza across Europe for 1,200 guests to witness his daughter, Vanisha Mittal marry Amit Bhatia, a young, London-based investment banker of Indian origin. The receptions were held among other places, the Battle Gallery of Chateau de Versailles (see the photo above) in France and the final bill of $60 million received no help from the tabloids.
So, back to our original question: how much should you spend on your wedding?