I haven’t, but this seems like an interesting idea to try out new gear or even just if you live in a small space and can’t store a bunch of camping stuff and/or don’t want to spend the $$$ fully gearing up because you only go once per year or something like that. The real test would be how good of condition the stuff is? I’m thinking about how when you rent skis (at the resort) the basic ones you can get are pretty beat up.
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We (couple) do $200 as well.
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When people say family for wedding gifts, do they mean siblings or cousins? Because I have a bunch of cousins plus cousins kids but then I don’t have any siblings.
I also am in the phase of life where most of my cousins are settled already, come to think of it, so the $50 figure in my head is a holdover years and years ago. I did recently send out $50 each to various nephlings who graduated high school.
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I don’t either, as a hard rule.
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Thank you! I’ll check them out
Yeah we are in both categories of not knowing what type of gear we’d want and living in a small space. I’m also not sure we’ll enjoy it together. We’ve done a lot of camper van camping but not tent. I’ve been getting more into climbing though and I want to start climbing outside, and that means camping, so I want to give it a go!
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They are localish but would show you what kinds of outfitting companies traditionally do this - my thought is that a company that starts with giant expedition gear can outfit car camping and will give you better stuff. Some car camping gear sucks
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I think this is very location specific. We didn’t get married very long ago (5 years) and we were given $25-$50 per person. 7 members of DH’s family (parents and siblings) chipped in together to give us a Kitchen Aid Mixer. The Midwest is definitely a cheaper place for giving wedding gifts.
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Well I didn’t realize I was cheap but now I wonder 
we haven’t been to a wedding in a couple years, but we do like a $30ish registry gift for friends, $50 for family.
(ETA married 7 years ago) To be fair, we had a “destination” wedding, (we basically eloped but invited a few friends and immediate family plus a couple extras, we had like 20 people?), and most of the people who were young and traveled did no gift or very cheap gifts. This bothered me 0% and I kinda always figured if you spend a shirtton on the travel than the gift is an optional gesture.
But, I come from (for my extended family/my moms history), a poor rural west coast family. Traditionally we do pot lucks on farms, so my anchor point may be way off for other places. Ex my brothers fiancé is from NYC and she bought us an entire plate/bowl/etc set that was a few hundred dollars and I was shocked. But I know now from her and her mom that’s just how they gift. They gift BIG for stuff.
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Not the whole midwest, lol. But definitely true for the LCOL places.
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$200 IMO. I think if you’re low income and can’t manage much then it’s totally fine to spend like $25, or if that’s the culture. But if you have money and they have money I think the expectation is more like $200.
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I’ve also varied my gifts based on how much I like them. Like, always a nice gift, but extra nice if I really like you.
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Hahaha, brutal!
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I’d say $100 each was the rule for rich people 15 years ago. So I’d imagine it’s 150+?
But also if it’s a friend with rich family, you can trust the family to handle the registry and cash and can do something sentimental or couple specific. Like my dad’s friends gave me a 200$ (between 3 of them) gift card to MEC for my first wedding.
For a friend setting up a house in a new city and getting married I got her a mandoline, some gadgets I don’t know the name of from a pan Asian kitchen gadget store and a beautiful water jug from a local artist for all under $100 and she was thrilled. Others I’ve done some sweet platters from the one of a kind show…
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Don’t want anyone to feel called out, but: do the folks who don’t do wedding gifts go to weddings?
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Along the wedding gift notion, I would have given my niece $100 or so if one or both of us had flown across the country. As we couldn’t swing it, the $200 gift cards.
These days, if we travelled except by car and had to have a hotel, etc. I’d probably do the same amount. For anyone who isn’t family or local, we probably just wouldn’t go.
Personally, I think destination weddings are in poor taste, as you’re asking people to spend a boatload of $ because it’s where you want to go. If I’d wanted to go someplace really badly like that, I would have been married locally and then gone to the destination on my honeymoon. I think the solution above, getting married where you want to and inviting a few people, might work.
I avoid weddings these days, as it seems there’s many $ “gotchas” I don’t know about.
btw: our wedding was in a judge’s chambers. No dinner. The reception was at a friend’s house. I do practice what I preach. The cost to the others was parking in downtown LA, except for DH’s family. who drove from the midwest. And, 5 years later, we had a “family” wedding, at his grandfather’s house, in the midwest, for folks who didn’t make it.
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As an opposing view- most often when I see friends do this, it’s so that they don’t favor one family or the other. They have family in 2 places, so rather than get married in one and have a family drama, they choose a neutral third place. The other time is when they live in a city neither of their families do, so everyone already has to travel. Flights to Cancun can be cheaper from most major airports than flights to a random town in the US. It’s usually the diplomatic approach actually.
(And our “destination” was my parents backyard. They just live in a different state)
(Oh and it wasn’t so much because we wanted to. It’s because we were going to go local, and our guest list was over 300 people and we still were only on family not friends, and I had a fucking breakdown. Moved the wedding up by 6 months and ran away)
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That makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of a destination wedding in Tahiti or Hawaii. I know of people who’ve been invited to those and because they were still working or retirees, it was just assumed that would be no problem!
You’re right. I just think that it can, like anything, be done badly.
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One consideration to when I was looking at marrying my ex was the fact that if we had the wedding at my cousins like we had discussed, there literally wasn’t enough lodging in the city to accommodate my exes side of the family. The closest place They could’ve stayed was like an hour and a half from my cousins farm. So even though our families only lived like five hours apart, we definitely would’ve had to pick a neutral third location. There also was the issue that his side of the family would’ve gotten super offended that we didn’t want a fancy Seattle venue, while my side of the family definitely would not have been able to afford driving up there and staying somewhere up there.
Anyway, I just think there are a lot more politics that go into all of it than most people realize. I think I would prefer to have another three day labor than to plan a wedding again.
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I was only invited to weddings in my early-mid 20s (most of my friends got married V. early) and now I’m at a phase where my 30s friends either aren’t getting married, or going to courthouse, etc. If a friend of mine who is in their late 30s and has been living with their spouse for years gets married…I don’t know, is a gift beyond a small personal token or a card really important? They already have their house set up, it’s not like they are just starting out trying to build a household.
In my early 20s I had no money, and if I was invited to a wedding often I couldn’t even afford to go…so I’d just send a card. Most of my friends had huge southern families who were taking good care of their registries without the help of their poor college friends, haha. If I went to a wedding that was close by, I would buy a small token gift, but I usually couldn’t afford more than that.
The last wedding I went to was for a close friend but it was across the country. I wasn’t going to miss the day, but after paying for a flight, accommodations, a dress, etc I had nothing extra for a gift. I wrote them a really nice, personal card but that was all I could manage at the time, being that I still had a super low income. I wish I had enough to pick out a personal gift or something…but I know that my friends felt me being there was a gift enough since we rarely see each other!
I think these days I’m at a place where I would spend $50 on a wedding gift, but probably no more than that. I know and respect that weddings are expensive, but also feel it’s a choice that people make to throw the party/spend the money and it’s always seemed strange to expect an expensive/elaborate gift in return for people attending your expensive party. That’s probably an unpopular opinion though. I also don’t have friends that really throw those types of weddings…usually we are talking mountain fields, sit down picnic type meal, not open bar, etc
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