By Cecilia Rydberg
Along with being one of the happiest days of your life, a wedding is an occasion for moral dilemmas, financial woes and two or ten tantrums.
Brought along from way back when, when a marriage was a matter of economic opportunity and yes, also often a matter of love, it was standard that the family of the bride pay a dowry to the groom and his family; a payment of sorts for the bride’s future habitation with the man in question. However, in more contemporary times, the dowry has evolved to a responsibility shift in the form of the parents of the bride paying for the wedding and all the costs that define it.
Yet, why should the parents of the bride dole out the cash? Well surprisingly, this tradition is no longer in the majority in the UK.
Pass the Buck
In the UK it is found that roughly 52% of couples nowadays pay for the expense of their wedding festivities, and this change, head of commercial at John Lewis Insurance says “may have come about because weddings are getting more expensive, meaning people are less willing to burden the bride’s parents with the whole cost. It might also be that the increasing age of marrying couples has given them greater financial independence.”
Average Cost of a Wedding
According to the popular go-to website Weddingguideuk.com, the average cost of a wedding lands on around “£11,000, overrunning by just 15 per cent out will mean having to find another £1,650. If your parents are paying for, or contributing to, your wedding, it is important that you don’t end up having to go back to them asking for more money and thereby putting them under unwelcome financial pressure. If you are paying for your wedding, it may mean starting married life with an unplanned debt.”
Splurge or Spend
For the couple that do not or cannot rely on their parents to dip into saving for financing their wedding; some necessary steps need to be taken to come to a conclusion on how best to save, what to prioritize in terms of dress, venue, catering and so on, and when to spend! Ways to save can be asking yourself the question of what can you do yourself; is it an option to make the invitations by hand, with a little home-made creative flair, is that something you would as a couple be able to take on in order to save a few hundred pounds? Do you need a traditional 7-tiered white cake?
Priorities vary from couple to couple, the venue and dress may be the most important to some and therefore couples might be more willing to cut back on the material expenses in order to snag their dream location.
Having a good plan of action for the wedding, might as unromantic as it sounds, help make the transition into the marriage smoother.
