Planning For Your Daughter’s Wedding

The recent Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle captivated people around the world.  It was a star-studded event which inspired Royal Wedding Watch Parties and people glued to their televisions for hours watching every intricate moment.  The ceremony, bride and décor were all absolutely stunning. It is estimated that the wedding cost roughly $46 million. Meghan’s dress was rumored to cost $130,000.  While these costs are something only royalty and fairy tales could afford, I find that my clients often feel like their daughter’s weddings will end up costing that much. It’s all relative right?

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with the cost of weddings. Once the costs for the event space, floral, food & drink and let’s not forget THE dress; they all add up and you feel like you’ll be spending your entire savings for one night of celebration. I wanted to write this blog to share with you that there is a way to make your daughter feel like a princess on her wedding day without breaking the bank.

Like everything in life, saving for your daughter’s wedding takes some planning. One thing that I always tell my clients is to plan for EVERYTHING in your future.  I firmly believe that if you budget, you can afford anything!

You can’t plan when or if your daughter gets married, but you can plan when you start saving for it. Americans spend, on average, $33,391 on their weddings, according to The Knot's 2017 Real Weddings Study.  The cost of your daughter’s wedding will vary depending on how many guests she has, if she will have a destination wedding and if she chooses a band over a DJ. It’s important to have open conversations with your daughter during the planning process about budget, what elements deserve a “splurge” and other elements she should conserve on. Planning the perfect wedding doesn’t always mean you have to spend a fortune.

We have developed plans for our clients to strategize for this incredible day and the expenses related to it.  It is important to us that our clients always have a quiet mind when it comes to their finances.  Like retirement, or college savings, we never want to wait until it’s too late to start saving for their daughter’s wedding day.

Here are a few ways that we advise our clients to save for their daughter’s happiest day of her life:

• Start a “honeymoon” fund and save weekly and/or monthly. You can even use a mason jar to start this savings! Bottom line, save early in her life and save often.
• Use long term growth savings vehicles. If you start saving for your daughter at age 5 and save $500 a month into a bank checking paying .5%, you would accumulate to approximately $126,000 in 20 years, or her age of 25.  However, if you decide to invest and make an average annual rate of 7% in a diversified portfolio, you would accumulate to $262,000, or an increase potentially of $136,000!
• Everyone has a few outfits just collecting dust in their closets. Why not put those unused clothes to use by selling them to raise money for your wedding or honeymoon? You can either try selling the clothes yourself online or take them to a consignment store.
• Common sense dictates that, and plenty of parents at least try to set a firm budget for each child. Set a number, such as $25,000 and her that they could spend it all on their wedding or they could budget well, cut corners and keep the balance. By putting the ball in their court, they handled it very responsibly.

I am sure a few of you are reading this thinking ‘well this sounds great Ric but I have more than 1 daughter.’ Don’t worry, I have plans in place for that as well! Please give me a call and I can create a custom plan to help you make your daughter(s) wedding a day she will never forget.