Birthday or Sunday brunch: Celebrations are short-term goals for many; costs rising rapidly
Personal finance goals typically include three big-ticket items: education, wedding and retirement. My children were still in high school during those early years of teaching and writing about financial planning. As I heard families setting aside money for weddings, my rational mind scoffed at the idea.
Why fuss about it when the quality of married life had nothing to do with the grandeur of the event, I thought. Isn’t it so ostentatious and indulgent, I rued. And yes, we won’t do this, I told myself.
Until our daughter got married.
She married a dear friend’s son eight years ago. The families knew one another well and we began to plan a simple wedding lasting half-a-day. Then things slowly got out of hand, not because someone pressured us to do what we did, but because the event became one in which we wanted to thank everyone who had come into our lives.
We made lists, went and met college and school friends, searched for earlier neighbours, and were soon set on this emotional ride that reached out and included family and friends in a celebration of our lives. The wedding was only an excuse, and a very valid one in our minds, for everyone to come together and have a good time. You have to go through the emotion to know what it is, I started telling myself.
Am I justifying something that, by all rational counts, seems like a wasteful expenditure? Isn’t this money better utilised for other, more worthy causes? I don’t know the answers.
I can confess that a wedding, which included so many who touched our lives, felt like the right thing to do. There isn’t an iota of regret about the decision. We had saved and invested, and did not drill a hole in our finances doing what we did.
However, big, fat weddings do hurt
