Wedding Woes

Here comes the ... bill!
Nuptial sticker shock is a sobering fact for brides and grooms
as wedding bells produce ever-larger wedding bills.
By Marilyn Gardner | The Christian Science Monitor | April 27, 2006

Brianne Della Rocca was determined to be a savvy bride, keeping wedding costs in check. Even when friends insisted that her $7,000 budget for 110 guests was impossible, she tried to hold firm.

"I said, 'I am not going to spend a fortune on one day,' " says Mrs. Della Rocca, a media-relations assistant in Bennington, Vt. "That's not what a wedding is about."

She read books about bridal bargains. She made the invitations herself. She bought supplies, dresses, and shoes on eBay at nominal cost. She did not hire a florist or a limousine. She didn't even order a wedding cake.

Even so, by the time she and her husband, Jared, said "I do" on Jan. 15, their expenses added up to $19,000. Despite help from parents, cash gifts at the reception, and money from savings, they faced debts of $9,000.

"That was the 'affordable' wedding on a shoestring budget," says a still-incredulous Della Rocca.

Nuptial sticker shock has become a sobering fact of life for many brides and grooms as wedding bells produce ever-larger wedding bills. More than a quarter of engaged couples now pay for everything themselves. With weddings averaging $23,000, some newlyweds remain indebted for years. Some must even seek credit counseling.

"There's a lot of pressure to do things in a very spectacular way," says Susan Schneider, executive editor of Bridal Guide magazine. "People get caught up in a momentum and end up spending more than they intended. You have to really keep your head on straight when you're a bride and groom these days."

In an informal poll by Bridal Guide, readers said they spent an average of $3,000 more than they had budgeted. Some overspent by $5,000 or $10,000.

Bridal experts offer a variety of reasons for the problem. Some parents simply can't afford to pay. In other cases, couples want control. Deborah McCoy, a wedding planner in Boca Raton, Fla., notes that many brides have told her, "If Mom and Dad pay for our wedding, we have to do things their way. We want to do things our way.' " So they spend, fueling a $120 billion-a-year industry.

Many couples also marry later. "The older you get, the more weddings you've been to," says Kamy Wicoff, author of "I Do but I Don't." "There's this snowballing of competition, this feeling that your wedding has to be bigger, better, more."

In a society where divorce is common, some couples feel "serious insecurity" about marriage, Ms. Wicoff says. "That's a good recipe for a lot of spending."

So is an obsession with perfection - a word Wicoff heard often as she interviewed 80 women for her book. "That emphasis on the perfect day, the perfect wedding, is one of the things that drives spending."

Wedding vendors also perpetuate an attitude that this is the most important day of your life. "They imply that if you're looking at cutting costs or not doing things 'right' - which is code for 'expensively' - your priorities aren't straight," Wicoff says. "But if you start out with a lot of debt in your new marriage, on top of all the other stresses and tensions of that first year, it can be a deal-breaker."

Pop culture also plays a role. "Look at all the wedding movies, such as 'The Wedding Planner' and 'Father of the Bride,' " says Ms. McCoy, president of the American Academy of Wedding Professionals. "You see these incredible, over-the-top weddings. Flowers in 'Father of the Bride' had to cost $50,000, minimum."

Some couples depend on gift envelopes from guests to help finance the event. Brides have told McCoy, "I hope we get a lot of money at the reception, or we're in deep trouble." She calls this "a very frightening scenario."

Cate Williams, a vice president at Money Management International in Chicago, heard one bride discussing their "projected take" at the reception. "I don't think anyone should plan a wedding based on the expectation that they would be receiving certain amounts of monetary gifts," she says. "My byword is, 'use cash to pay for consumables, credit for durables.' While a wedding is a very important commitment that any couple makes, it still falls in the realm of entertainment and consumables."

She emphasizes that the ceremony, the most important part of the event, is probably the least expensive.

Overextended newlyweds usually come to see Ms. Williams and other credit counselors between eight and 12 months after the wedding. "It's the first time they've come face to face with how much they owe and what the interest rate is," she says. The number of couples seeking counseling for wedding-related debt doubled between 2002 and 2003, according to Wicoff.

From Williams's perspective, situations like these are "very preventable" when couples are realistic and engage in good planning and budgeting.

Many couples do take on debt responsibly. When Brian Kolonick and Mandy Hausler exchange vows before 250 friends and relatives on June 23, they will foot nearly three-quarters of the bill themselves.

"I have just taken a very large credit advance to pay for it," says Mr. Kolonick, who works for a nonprofit group in Englewood, Colo. "We are about to enter a world of debt." He expects it will take a year or two to pay off everything.

"It's definitely worth it," Kolonick adds, noting that he did considerable research and cost analysis. "Mandy had a perception of how she wanted the wedding, and I did, too. I don't feel any costs are too extravagant, or not worth it, or silly." They are saving 50 percent on the reception by holding it on Friday rather than Saturday.

When Laura Ward of Atlanta walked down the aisle the first time 10 years ago, the couple went "a little bit" into debt. "It was very hard to pay off, because money is such a sore spot for people who are married."

When she remarried last December, she vowed not to incur any debts. "We spent about $15,000 with 65 guests, and I don't regret a thing," she says. "We paid off everything as we went." By contrast, her sister and brother-in-law took out a second mortgage to finance their dream wedding at the Four Seasons on Maui.

To save money, Mrs. Ward did not hire a videographer. "How many times am I going to pop a tape in?" she says, adding, "You have to try not to buy into all the hype about what's important, and decide for yourself what's important and what you're going to remember. If you've allotted X amount, stay within it. If you can't afford it, don't do it."

Cara Halstead Cea of Pleasantville, N.Y., describes the year leading up to her wedding last October and the few months after it as "excruciatingly tight financially." She is still disputing more than $700 in extra charges from the photographer that weren't in the contract.

For Della Rocca, paying off the bills has been difficult, primarily because "you know you're not paying off a car, or a house, or something tangible."

Even so, she says, "It was worth it, and we had a wonderful time." But she adds, "Would I do it differently? I would." Her scaled-down version would be an intimate dinner at a nice restaurant for 45 of the couple's closest family and friends, with a pianist or violinist, flowers, a wedding dress, and photographer. She wouldn't spend more than $250 on a dress, and would do her own hair and makeup. "I would spend the same on the photographer, which was hefty, because pictures will be how you remember your event," she says.

McCoy, who emphasizes that she loves weddings, says, "If you have $10 million and want to throw a $100,000 wedding, fantastic. What I am totally against are weddings where people can't afford to pay, when the money could be spent on [other] great things to get them started."

"We have to get back to basics," she adds. "We have to put our families ahead of our wants, and make weddings what they used to be."

I Love You, Let's Have a Blowout
Doing time in the wedding-industrial complex.
By Meghan O'Rourke | Slate.com | May 5, 2007

Earlier this spring, my boyfriend and I went to look at wedding invitations. We were keeping it low-key, we thought; we were busy with our jobs; we were skeptical, slightly, of weddings. Several weeks and four visits to the stationer later, we still hadn't chosen an invitation, though we had spent more hours than I care to name studying hundreds of possibilities—letterpress flowers, engraved champagne glasses, be-ribboned envelopes. Initially, I had tried to choose from among our first 50 options; the woman "helping" us said, "But you can't! I haven't even shown you the best ones yet." In the interest of pressing forward, I left the task in my partner's capable hands while I turned to the matter of finding an officiant. When my fiance finally told me his choice—a letterpress image on cream rectangular card stock—I heard myself utter the words, "But cream is too dark—and I really preferred the square!"

Somehow, I had developed a powerful—one might say improbable—attachment to the aesthetics of a square invitation. What had happened to me?

The question of why so many Americans become obsessed with lavish weddings has been tackled by a whole host of TV shows and books lately. It animates shows like Bridezilla (a reality series from WE), Bride vs. Bride (WE), and My Fair Brady: We're Getting Married (VH1), and books like the anthology Altared. It is the question that Rebecca Mead tries to answer in her excellent (and unnerving) new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, which examines how and why, exactly, the American wedding came to be a multibillion-dollar-a-year business as likely to scar couples for life as to bring them together in harmonious unity. (Disclosure: I know Mead slightly.)

Fluster over weddings in America isn't exactly new: In Father of the Bride (1950), Spencer Tracy plays an upper-middle-class father confounded by the costs and commotion of putting together a wedding. But the angst has become more pricey and pervasive. A cynic could make the case that there is no better test of a union's prospects in our late-consumer capitalist society than its capacity to navigate the acquisitive choices and pressures involved in planning a big wedding. Today's marriage ceremony is indeed a statement of love: the love of buying things, and, more particularly, buying things that have been personalized to express one's taste and, so the industry tells us, the essence of who one is. Ahead lie years of that same pursuit (if all goes according to plan). What better pledge (our cynic might ask) of a bond's longevity than for spouses to discover that they can jointly define the brand right from the get-go?

But of course no wedding planner is going to play the cynic. And so every exchange you have with wedding planners is coated with a patina of sentimentality—with the pretense that you are dealing in emotions rather than commodities. "Tell me the story of your wedding," the salespeople say—whether at Vera Wang or at the funky little store downtown where you can get off-the-rack gowns. "Tell me the story," they say, as though sitting you down for a heart-to-heart. Of course, what they extract is not the story of romance, of how you and your partner met, of what it means to ask your family and friends to witness your public display of private feelings. It is the story of "by the shore" or "at the country club"; fall or spring; black-tie or flip-flops; "strapless" or "empire waist"; of "$$" or "$$$."

We succumb in part because the real story of a wedding—its central point—has become increasingly obscure, even as the average price of one has soared (to nearly $28,000 in 2006). Weddings today are not the life-changing (and even traumatic) events they once were. Sex is no longer postponed or shrouded in secrecy, nor are the domestic niceties of sharing linens and kitchens new to honeymooners: According to some figures, more than 50 percent of Americans have co-habitated before they get married. It is not clear what is "different" about life post-marriage, other than one's tax form—and the unnerving prospect of divorce; after all, many of today's couples are children of divorced parents and know firsthand just how precarious the institution is. So the wedding becomes an exercise in magical thinking: If my teeth are white and my linens match my napkins, he and I will stay in love forever. This is the "impending transformation of [our] inward self" (as Mead puts it) that we're seeking in the "outward accumulation of stuff."

Why is it so hard for even a skeptical young couple to resist this magical thinking? It is, after all, so obviously perverse, not least in turning sensible women with egalitarian ideals into dithering throwbacks. Fantasies may be great in marriage, but they are rarely a very firm foundation for it, and pre-feminist "white blindness"—the term wedding-industry types use to describe the state of near abandon that comes over even the most reluctant bride—is, well, infantilizing. Why not get the very best? It's once in a lifetime—etc. Yet it is the infantilizing dream that continues to allure. Trying on a lavish dress bedecked with almost imperceptible crystals, I found myself strangely smitten—and telling my fiance about it, he said, "Maybe you really like planning this wedding." What Kool-Aid had he—and I—been drinking? No wonder one consultant at an annual wedding-industry conference told his audience, "You are selling dreams, and you can charge anything."

But perhaps the best cure is to recognize that it isn't really some exotic Kool-Aid after all. The cynics are right: Commerce in dreams is business as usual (and amongst themselves, even the wedding planners are cynics—as evidenced by terms like "white blindness"). Being able to see that, even as we succumb to it, is at least a step. What is most distinctive about the wedding industry isn't that it persuades us to spend a lot of time and money on the event—as consumers today, we're besieged by what Barry Schwartz has called the "paradox of choice" and can waste precious minutes just trying to find the right toothpaste. What's different here is that the wedding juggernaut can persuade us to spend so much more money than we feel we should.

When you stop and think about it, there are some clear-cut market reasons—never mind magical ones—that explain why that is. First, it's the couple's parents who often pay for the event (and are possibly even more sentimental about it than the couple in question). Second, wedding customers don't plan to come back, so the vendors have no incentive to make us lifelong customers (even if they want us to recommend them to friends). Finally, the industry's intensely nostalgic, gauzy pitch ("It's your day to look beautiful!") makes it hard to be a good consumer, bent on getting value for your money. The pernicious thing about the wedding industry's consumerism run amok is precisely its rhetorical pretense that the endeavor is entirely anti-consumerist.You're made to feel guilty if you try to cut corners, as if to do so is to cheapen your love. As a friend warned us back when we started the process: "You just have to accept that you're going to be a sucker."

So we have—lured by the knowledge that at least we'll get a good party out of it. And in a funny sense, the bustle makes very unsentimental sense: Such an investment in a wedding day puts the pressure on to stick it out for some time to come. In the meantime, our invitations arrived—an ivory rectangle—and they look great.

Your Big Fat Foolish Wedding
By Michelle Singletary | Washington Post | March 20, 2008

In several recent online discussions, I've gotten into a debate about the cost of a wedding.

It all started when someone on a tight budget asked: "How do I find a place and feed 100 people?"

I responded that the best solution is to stick to your budget and cut the guest list.

Well, you would have thought I had attacked the very institution of family.

Here's what one person said: "I was surprised at your advice to the poster who wanted to reduce wedding costs. I absolutely agree that people should stick to a wedding budget, but I was raised to believe that weddings are not just about the couple, but about the families being joined together. So the guest list is the last thing to cut, not the first."

Another wrote: "Certain cultures and religions do place a lot of emphasis on family during a wedding celebration."

Then there was this response from someone who cut costs and was ridiculed by relatives.

"My family was just appalled at the 'quaintness' of my wedding, a lunch with a cocktail hour," the person wrote. "It wasn't a big New York blowout. I got married in Atlanta. They wouldn't even have thought about coming down here if they weren't getting fed. Honestly, I would have been embarrassed to do much less."

There you have it, folks.

This is one the reasons so many people are broke. They -- perhaps even you -- are trying to meet other people's expectations.

A wedding is not about the family. The families aren't being joined together (although you likely will have to deal with a lot of family drama). A wedding is about the couple. (And no, Bridezilla, it's not about you.) It's supposed to be about the vows the two people make to each other. Onlookers, except for the required official and/or witnesses, are expendable.

Yes, I'm aware that many cultures have blowout bashes to celebrate the holy matrimony of two people. In some cultures, brides, grooms or their families spend precious resources -- money, farm animals, etc. -- to pay for weddings.

But some traditions, no matter how venerable, should be abandoned if they aren't reasonable. You can and should put a price on this special day. You should have the wedding you can afford.

When I say afford, I mean weigh the wedding expenses against how that money could be better used. Consider whether it's worth spending upward of $30,000 for a wedding in which the majority of the costs goes toward the reception and honeymoon -- a party and vacation.

At least ask yourself if the money you plan on spending for some lavish wedding and honeymoon could be better used to pay down debt, buy a home or invest for retirement.

I've always believed that you start with a budget. Then you plan for the wedding. That's what I did when planning my own wedding almost 17 years ago. If you start with a guest list, the venue or any of the other things you want, you will overspend.

ING Direct, the online banking company, surveyed British couples and found that spiraling costs forced people to postpone their weddings or abandon getting hitched altogether. Fifteen percent of the couples said they didn't think they would ever get married, with the majority claiming this was because of the huge cost involved.

How idiotic that folks who say they've found the love of their life won't commit because they don't have the funds for the celebration. You can get married for what it costs to attend a play.

Trust me, there are people who have found marital bliss by spending less.

"I've already found the friend's back yard to hold the wedding/reception," one person wrote. "The rest of our money will be spent on a mini-weekend away until we can afford the European getaway of 'my' dreams, perhaps as a five-year anniversary gift."

If friends or family complain about a small guest list, simply say, "We would love to have a bigger bash but we just can't." End the discussion there, because it's your life and your money.

Here's what I tell couples fretting over paying for a big wedding. Spend lavishly for your wedding if you like -- with money you have saved, not with any debt -- if you can check off the following:

> You have three to six months of living expenses saved up.

> You have a life-happens fund. This fund is used for everyday expenses, such as car repairs.

> You both are saving for retirement.

> Neither of you has credit card or student loan debt.

> If you have children, there are college funds for each in place.

If you can't check off every single item on that list, then you need to reconsider big reception plans and go on an inexpensive honeymoon, because you can't afford more.

Michelle Singletary discusses personal finance Tuesdays on NPR's "Day to Day": online at http://www.npr.org.