Do you have the money for your daughter’s wedding?

U.S. couples spend, or should I say their parents spend, on average, $20,398 for their wedding

Recession or not, our baby daughter Diane is getting married. After two years of being squired around town by young Timothy, who I regarded as a son after the first month, they’re finally talking the giant step. My wife and I are thrilled, and relieved. Adding Tim to the family will be an easy task and he will be a great asset. He may even get to help me in my law practice one of these days. “So where do we begin?” asked my wife after dinner. “Where everything begins these days,” I said. “Online. Type ‘wedding costs, or weddings or wedding preparations’ into Google and see what you get. That should keep you busy for the first month.”

Personal Loans

I’m not sure what my wife will find on the internet. One thing I do know, though, is that a wedding is probably not a subject for a Personal Loan from the Money Store. On the same subject, I suspect that by the time my baby daughter is safely wed, I will have chalked up a long list of loans.

The wedding search

I was right. It is all online. There are sites where you type in your zip code, go through and tick off a list of options, answer a few questions and the computer spits out an estimate for a wedding of your choice after a couple of seconds. Be warned, none of the estimates are cheap and depending on your zip code, it will pay you to tell your daughter to elope or just move out of town with her boyfriend.

The wedding is just the beginning

Some couples end up using all the monetary gifts they get to pay for the wedding, especially where the parents cannot afford the big splurge or are not willing to refinance their mortgage to finance it. Other couples split the costs down the middle and in other cases, the wealthier family foots the bulk of the bill. Whatever the case, we’re talking about major money. The day after the wedding, the money problems start in earnest.

After the ball is over…

We have the photographs and the video of the wedding, we have gone through the list of gifts and we have mailed out thank-you cards. They have another 2 weeks in Tim’s rather crummy apartment and then the lease comes to an end and they have to move. They’d love to move into that super place they saw on Maple Street. It’s still vacant but the rental is sky-high. We need to sit down and help them build a budget.

The newly-wed budget

Why did they get married, they wonder now – the bills are stacking up and it’s starting to look like a financial impossibility. How does everyone manage this? Okay, that Maple Street apartment is expensive. They know that and they know they can’t afford it. But in this budget that we sweated over with them last night, they can’t see that they can afford any apartment at all. It looks like they’ll have to move in with us. If we hadn’t spent $20,398 on their wedding, we could have put a down payment on a house for them.