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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how expensive events actually are? An average wedding can easily run into tens of thousands of USD?

Lots of those costs will still be there. Catering, food, AV, Decorations, etc etc don’t just become free because you bought a palace. Also now you have to take care of a centuries old building, hire gardeners.

All that is besides the point which is that these people are clearly not motivated by the principles they espouse.

What he meant was that everyone can accept buying is better than renting. Most people can’t accept that this was the most efficient purchase possible.

I guess it's a nice place and people want to have events at nice places and if they held it for 200 years it would be a good investment?

Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. If you own the place, you're on the hook for maintenance, which can be pretty high for old buildings. While the asset may appreciate in value over time, the cost of carry may negate that price appreciation.

Or you can decide not to do maintenance but then the value won't appreciate.

If you focus on the essentials, bypass the glitz, and are selective with sourcing, you can run a great wedding for a few thousand. The main costs are land-hire, marquee, catering, and equipment. The rest is free or low-cost. That's what we did, and people still remember it fondly nearly ten years on.

One thing your numbers probably don't consider is the cost of hosting the guests? For a wedding that is usually not considered the responsibility of the hosts, but it is still a cost associated of the event. In this case, one of the reasons why this building seems to be a good fit for the project is that most of it has been carved up into small bedrooms. (I think this happened in the early 20th century when it was used as student housing, if I remember what Owen told me correctly.)

We invited guests to camp over at the field that we hired; it was about £20 per tent which we passed half of to the guests. So that counted a few hundred towards our overall costs (included in my few thousand figure).

Obviously I wouldn't expect CEA to run a campsite, but it was a lot of fun for wedding.

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