Why, back in the day when
we got married,
[cue the Four Yorkshiremen]...
My oldest daughter has just gotten engaged and this is my first experience with weddings... Does any one know what a typical wedding costs? I live in Nashville but my daughter lives and will be getting married in Seattle. I would like to be able to give her a reasonable budget to work within without breaking the bank....
The Dollar Stretcher has a whole collection of wedding topics:
The Dollar Stretcher
As you might imagine from a website like that, there's a keen competition to outdo the Four Yorkshhiremen.
Our daughter married in 1992. We gave her a $6,000 budget for a Houston wedding. We told her that she could have any money left over, but if she went over it was on her. I think they went a couple of hundred over and we covered it. It was a nice wedding with wine at the reception. She was happy with her choices and her wedding.
I have always thought of weddings as a send off. Being practical, I don't think you should ever spend more on the wedding than the bride and groom will receive in gifts. It seem, however, today the sky is the limit and it is more emphasis on the party.
I'm conflicted, but there has to be a way to align the recipient's priorities (max value for min cost) with yours. We tried to do this with our kid's choice of a college laptop-- she was given an unlimited budget but told that it would reduce the profit-sharing from her college fund. After months of research and debate (and a lot of hardware/software education from Dad), only a Macbook would do.
I can understand the [-]marketing reality distortion field[/-] attraction, but she essentially spent $1100 for $500 of hardware, marginal performance, a closed OS, and a lack of software choices. I know I could have done a lot better with a PC laptop, but the "it just works" feature turned out to be exactly the right one for her. Psychologically she's thrilled, motivated, and committed to her choice instead of grumbling or angling for upgrades. Me, too-- I've never had to do a bit of Dad's Tech Support for her.
So if someday that blessed nuptial announcement comes from our kid, I guess we'd try to work up our own cost estimate that would match our values. We'd write a check to the happy couple and ask them to tell us where to show up when.
Maybe I'd find more value to the cost of the wedding if I was invited to the bachelor party. No, wait, that might send the wrong sort of message to the gorilla who's sleeping with my baby girl. Maybe spouse would apply that logic to the bachelorette party. Gosh, I can't imagine how her presence at that would affect the enthusiasm of the other participants.
Gee, I wonder if they'd be tempted to throw the affair here in Hawaii...
No real debts or obligations, but both plan on going back to school, my daughter for an MBA and the groom for architecture. I plan on helping my daughter with the MBA but I'm sure that between the two of them they will be incurring some debt soon. Both currently have very good jobs but daughter has some scholarships she needs to use within the next couple of years and really does need the MBA to progress in her field.
I plan on giving her the fixed amount similar to what MichaelB has described, I wonder if that applies to the maximum allowable gift per year without tax law? Same question on helping with the MBA?
I suspect that if you donate your money to a 529 and use that to pay for your daughter/SIL's educational expenses (which is a very broad category for 529s) then you'd be able to continue to gift each one of them $13K/year. But I'd check Fairmark or IRS.gov first.
Let's just say back when I did taxes (early 80s) there was one rich guy who spent $2 million on his daughter's wedding... and he wanted us to write it off as a business expense... the partner had a nice converstion with him about orinary and necessary business expenses...
