It’s easy to get carried away while planning a wedding — with so many factors to consider and so many people to please, the soon-to-be-wed can find themselves racking up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.
Despite widely-held anxieties about big-ticket weddings, however, nearly 20% of Americans say that they’ve spent more time planning for their current or future wedding than they have for retirement. Sixteen percent of Americans say they would even be willing to go into debt for their big day, according to a recent study from financial planning advisor Empower.
Experts have attributed the rising cost of nuptials to a myriad of factors: couples are delaying their weddings until they’re older and have higher incomes; wedding vendors are needing to upcharge to financially compensate for the seasonal nature of the industry; and a pent up demand following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is making it possible to charge brides and grooms more money.
“You have [fewer] venues and the same number of weekends,” Vishal Joshi, the CEO and co-founder of Joy, a wedding planning and registry company, told Marketplace.
In many respects, attitudes about wedding expenses reveal how contradictory people can be when it comes to planning their nuptials. Two in five Americans say that weddings aren’t worth splurging on — but on average people plan to spend $31,281 on their big day. Forty-five percent of wedding guests say they aren’t sure how much they’re supposed to spend buying gifts, even as 71% of Americans say they’d rather get cash in lieu of a present anyways.
Simply searching online for the phrase “weddings are too expensive” brings up a litany of social media threads, op-eds, and advice columns responding to would-be brides, grooms, and wedding guests who are anxious about shelling out cash for wedding celebrations.
In fact, the cost of weddings — even for attendees — has gotten so steep that nearly half of Americans say they hope they won’t be asked to be a bridesmaid or groomsman in the next year, the Empower study revealed.
“Everyone is treating me like a charity case who’s also a bad friend and making everything difficult,” one distressed bridesmaid recently told The Cut’s financial advice column. “I’ve been very open about the fact that I can’t afford the options that are being offered, but I just get shamed for it.”