We Tried To Have A $12,000 Wedding In Toronto. Here’s What It Actually Cost Us

I never really envisioned getting married. In addition to being the child of a fairly nasty divorce, turning love into a contract always seemed kind of gross and antiquated.

But when you meet the right person, the cage you built around your beliefs when you were young can start to disintegrate. In this case, that person was my wife, Sanchia.

It took a while for my anti-marriage stance to soften, but we were in immediate lock-step when it came to our wedding. An oversized, showy to-do was not for us.

We weren’t interested in flexing, and the idea of going way into debt for a ceremony seemed ridiculous to us, especially since we wanted to pay for everything ourselves and not burden our parents, who are all either retired or soon to be.

All we wanted was a party; a fun, beautiful party for our closest friends and family. How much could that possibly cost?

How it started: The $12,000 fantasy

Were we naive to think we could do a wedding in Toronto for $12,000? Totally. “Naive” is putting it mildly.

But it seemed possible when we started planning back in the summer of 2025.

Sanchia told me she had found the perfect venue: the Sky Lounge at a friend’s condo building down by the waterfront. It had a kitchen, fit 60 people, offered a postcard-worthy view of the Toronto skyline and provided a blank slate for design and decor.

Doing a combined ceremony/reception there would cost us only $250 — on a Saturday night.

We figured that since we’d already saved thousands of dollars on venue costs without compromising, we could probably pull off the same trick when it came to everything else.

Ah, such adorable hubris. While our assumption was colossally wrong, it wasn’t a mistake. It gave us a goal and forced us to be strategic.

How we saved: a TFSA hack

We put ourselves on a strict savings plan — $500 each per month starting in August 2025 — which would give us $12,000 to work with by the time our ceremony rolled around a year later. Rather than dumping our cash into a high interest savings account, we took advantage of the contribution room left in Sanchia’s tax-free savings account and invested it in some reliable stocks (thank you, Canadian banks) and ETFs.

I can’t give you a true accounting of how our investments did since we were making withdrawals whenever a vendor needed to be paid, but when we finally cashed out around the day of our wedding, our remaining TFSA holdings were up 25% over the previous 12 months. Not bad, but it’s not a strategy for everyone.

As the savings piled up during the last half of 2025, we were feeling pretty smart. Then we started pricing out vendors.

How it went: Reality comes crashing

I knew our budget was in trouble as soon as Sanchia told me the photographer was going to cost almost $3,000. I couldn’t believe it, so I compared average prices for wedding photographers and other vendors. We were actually getting a deal.

That was the case with a few other vendors. We asked a friend of ours with her own wedding decor business to decorate the space. That saved us a few thousand dollars. The DJ, who worked our friends’ wedding two years prior, gave us a discounted rate of $1,400.

Our caterer, even though they were our biggest expense, also provided the greatest savings. They were able to source some rentals, like silverware, glassware and a few last-minute items, at lower prices than the company that supplied our tables and chairs. They also offered a major discount because we paid in cash. (Always ask vendors about cash discounts. They’re not legal and they’re not common, but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.)

The last place we saved money was on booze, which we bought ourselves at the LCBO. This involved some legwork on my part, but it allowed us to stock our open bar with whatever we wanted without paying any caterer markup.

I asked Google's Gemini to ballpark how much alcohol we should buy — and then ignored most of its suggestions, which felt low. Based on how much leftover liquor we had, I should have deferred to the bot. We were, however, able to return about $300 worth of unopened hooch.

Here’s the final rundown of what our quaint wedding actually cost us:

How we felt: Utterly blissed-out

Some people might look down their nose at a $20,000 wedding, but ours couldn’t have been better. We had a custom menu inspired by our personal histories that people raved about. The venue looked like a bridal magazine come to life. The DJ killed it, the drinks flowed, and everywhere you looked you saw people laughing with each other.

We didn’t skimp. We didn’t cut corners. We just did things our own way — and wound up having the big, beautiful party we had envisioned all along.

Our final bill was almost $21,000 — or 71% above our original target. According to recent Wealthsimple polling, that’s right in line with how wrong most Canadians are when estimating their wedding costs.

Thanks to our saving/investing strategy, the funding gap was a pretty manageable $6,000 or so. Using some of the gift money we received from our parents, whose help we needed after all, we wound up having the wedding of our dreams without going into debt. We saved that for our honeymoon.

Obviously, what really kept a lid on the cost was the scale of our wedding. We wound up with 45 guests; perfect for us, but probably too few for a lot of people. If a larger wedding is in your future, use our experience as a starting point and inflate the alcohol, food, venue and rental budgets accordingly.

But if our wedding inspires you to do yours on a realistic scale, I’m sure you won’t regret it. I’ve never talked to a married couple about their wedding and heard someone say, “You know, I wish we’d done it bigger.”