Couples are taking out loans to pay for their weddings
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Poor life choices is what causes you to get in debt (with the exception of medical deb, unless well, your poor life choices caused your medical condition).
In place of all these sob stories and begging for loan forgiveness maybe we should go back to the schools and educate all of our next generation about the badness of taking out debt with the same gusto as we did saying how badly you need a degree and to take out a bunch of debt to do so.
Lets bring back "You can't afford it" followed with "It won't be the end of the world if you can't invite 200 people to a wedding you really can't afford".
ELOPE PEOPLE!
Hooray for completely opaque moderation!
Edit: Boy, you guys sure are committed to strengthening the echo chamber...
I have bumped into dang a at least once, so I would not be surprised if you were not right.
While I feel like I try to make my points clear on a topic and leave room for discussion, I do find that some topics HN is simply not ready to have open honest conversations about. While I don't want to enforce a echo chamber and often play the delves advocate, I do try to respect the decisions and rules this site has set.
However, I think the solution you propose is generally correct. We need to create a social pressure in the opposite direction of pressures pushing for people to take on debt.
We can change the social perception by speaking out about it. If we don't speak out about it, its basically giving a pass to a bad social norm.
If marketing still was pushing the issue, but all your friends were like "fuck getting in to deb" and treated debt like the black death far fewer people would find them self's chained to institutional debt.
90% of the things people are buying today did not even exist 100 yeas ago and people got along fine.
So I urge people, when your friends are considering debt, have a serous talk to them about the consequences. And let them know, that new gadget, event, fancy dohikie they will use 3 times before they get board of it is just not needed.
Starting with student loans... Giving $150,000 to an 18 year old is rarely a good risk, and it normalizes borrowing extremely large sums of money with no clear way to pay it back on the assumption that it'll all work out in the end. Higher education should find a different business model.
The model in which such few people should be accessing it -> lower demand -> lower prices.
I know, beating the dead horse and such. But that degree in interpretative native dance is doing little to help humanity.
Debt can be a good thing if used in the right manner (borrowing to buy a home you plan to live in the long term is a prime example).
Financing has its place and its role. What's lacking (on top of general financial education) in society is proper decision-making skills.
Fix that, and these sorts of stories will happen less and less. However, getting there is a whole other can of worms...
This article doesn't really read like sob stories though. It seems like the opposite with they way they put (arguably) scare quotes around "Instagram-worthy" and have quotes from couples wondering if they should have done things differently. Also:
> “The problem is, you don’t want to rely on a personal loan for something that isn’t necessary — and there is nothing necessary about an expensive wedding,” said Stefanie O’Connell
> “You have to put it in context,” she said. “You could spend $30,000 on a one-day celebration, or you could use it to put a down payment on a house. These loans sound great when you’re planning your wedding, but afterward, I hear a lot of regret.”
Then banks gained sales departments, quotas and commissions. The world started accumulating selling scandals.
A bit of education does not have a chance of balancing the scale against billions of marketing. "Smoking kills", yet folks still started smoking.
I just can't fathom doing something like this (let alone spending anywhere near that kind of my own money on a wedding), but I just never grasped the need for an extravagant wedding so I might be out of the norm here.
Some friends are getting married on the weekend and I was shocked to learn that they're spending close to $50,000 on the wedding, and that's after a raising over $5,000 at their social and getting financial support from both their families to pay for the event. That's like a downpayment on a house! Insanity.
partially its because it's just plain cheaper there but a lot of it is just how freaking overboard some people go with weddings!
If they borrowed it against an asset, fine...but no bank is going to approve a loan for that amount for “a wedding”.
The main point I was getting at was that the scenario isn’t likely to be a pattern among people.
Taking out a $150,000 loan for a wedding describes the purpose of the loan, not the collateral.
We rented a VFW Hall in an unsexy corner of town, did our own flower arrangements, got a dirt cheap but good dj (her website was literally something like cheapdj.com), had a friend make a cupcake smorgasboard, etc etc and I think everything came to around 14K for 250 guests. We have high income careers and had an amazing time, so the expense wasn't any kind of burden, but it's a shame to me that something like even our humble (albeit somewhat big and on a Saturday during peak season) wedding seems maybe out of the reach of a lot of middle class young people.
And this in spite of living in a culture where guests are supposed to give gifts that at least cover their part of the bill ;)
However, for people for whom that isn't financially responsible, I'd suggest that that mentality isn't appropriate. The question shouldn't be "what do the guests absolutely require?", but "what can we afford? and what do we want?" In that order!
The bare minimum for a wedding is a court wedding. There are some reasons why that may not be the best idea at scale (that is, it may be individually appropriate but there are social reasons why that's not ever going to be the only sort of wedding). From there, the next thing you need is somewhere to gather some people. Are you really obligated to feed them? Depends on the time you pick. Are you obligated to rent a hall rather than find somewhere you can go for free? I'd say not. Do you need flowers scaled to the number of guests? Not really need, no. etc.
Given the ability of money issues to tear marriages apart, I'd say a new couple should strive quite hard to avoid debt for their wedding, and I'd say, get brutal with those costs. If social conventions are driving you into debt, screw social conventions. They were not, in the past, built for that purpose. To a non-trivial extent, they are built in the present for that purpose, and the answer to that is to not just decline to play, but to be angry at the people manipulating those conventions to put you in debt, just to ensure you stay in the right frame of mind. Plus if enough people do that, we can take them back.
"If social conventions are driving you into debt, screw social conventions." has application well beyond this particular matter, too.
I'd switch the order. Once you decide what you want, then you cut or adjust expectations to fit your budget. Just make sure to set the budget before making decisions. For example, if you want live music at the reception, you find a musician(s) or band that fit your budget, without simply deciding you can't afford it.
Hosting an event isn't simply like making a big purchase either, for most weddings there are a lot of staff involved (cooks, waiters, flower arrangers, cleaning staff, etc). Should their wages be cut in order to facilitate someone's dream wedding at a discount?
Any venue that has room for 250 people + catering should not be doing it for less than $40 a person!
as an aside, I've been to a few very expensive weddings and one thing that always gets to me is the food. it's usually some very fancy looking steak or seafood dish that tastes totally bland. I can tell it cost a lot of money per plate just to buy the ingredients but it never tastes good. I'm sure if you did something like burgers or pizza, it could be delicious and possibly even cheaper, so why do they do this? is everyone else in on some big game of pretend high cuisine? is it for the pictures?
It's always for the pictures.
It's kind of insane to me, as a millenial, that chasing the instagram aesthetic is such a thing that people are willing to take out loans to facilitate such events.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. You buy a car or house you can't afford, sure, you can live in it for a while. But sooner or later, that will catch up to you.
I'd say, yes.
I think there's two types of "expensive" (for lack of a better word). There's the type of "expensive" that does its best to have the surface appearance of quality, but under the hood it's all as cheap as possible. This is basically a way to con middle-class people by making it look higher class, but in reality, they're not getting that much more, so they can jack the price up a great deal more than the costs would require. (It's not entirely a con, in the sense that the customer is successfully projecting an image of a higher class wedding to their probably-middle-class attendees, but it's still an expensive process.)
Then there's the type of expensive where quality is actually a concern and the money is being put into improving the experience in a deep and meaningful way, tested by many people who have in some manner developed some amount of discrimination in taste by experience over years.
Signs you've got the former include: They're serving a nut/berry salad on a bed of mixed greens, because that's a sophisticated salad. But the sophistication of a nut/berry salad is the balancing of the bitterness of the nut against the sweetness of the dried berry (cherry, cranberry, etc), possibly helped by the dressing (most common with a bit more sweetness), and some of the greens (endive is a nice bitter, for instance). If you buy cheap nuts, they'll often have lost their bitter aromatics. Somehow, you can buy cheap dried fruit that isn't very sweet either. Or you can pair the cheap, not-bitter nuts with dried cranberries, so you're "balancing" bitter with sour, or bitter with "sour except covered over by too much sugar", or other such things. It has the form of a relatively sophisticated salad, but very little of the substance. Another mistake is treating the mixed greens as being all neutral, but including a frisee [1] in the mix, unbalanced. Frisee balanced with sweet is pretty nice; frisee left as the primary player in the dish is awful.
As you say, foods renowned for being tasty, somehow stripped of all taste. It is actually possible to serve a buffet of tasty food, but it is (no sarcasm) a challenge. It is certainly possible to serve plates of tasty food, even at a bit of scale. No sarcasm, at this point in my life I'd rather attend a wedding catered by Chipotle that a standard "we serve a fake-high-class fish and chicken plate with tasteless-pate and capers randomly thrown on things." The Chipotle will taste pretty good! (I actually thought for a while that capers were just useless signalling that nobody liked. Then I experimented and made a couple of home recipes that used them very well. They're still not my favorite, but I get them now, which I didn't after what must be several dozen dishes served with them present.)
The decorations of the hall are regular, mass-produced fittings, but someone came along afterwards and randomly sprayed them with something that looks vaguely like plaster.
The funny thing is that the price difference the two types of "expensive" are often poorly related, and at times they'll even be nearly equal. I know some restaurants where we end up with $25-$30/adult that are frankly only marginally better than Burger King. But I also know some restaurants with similarly-priced plates where all the food is noticeably a true cut above the common $10-15 places. But the former seems to have no problem staying in business. (At least in my area.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endive#/media/File:Friseesalat... possibly also known as "endive", though that seems to be a term for several varieties
Our solution: courthouse wedding (cost of, whatever, the cost of a marriage license). Then, three or four parties in different parts of the world. Each one might set us back, oh, $500 or $1000 if we have to rent a cheap space or hire a DJ, but we'll supply some snacks and booze and let friends bring the rest.
Total cost, including travel (because we can crash with friends once we're somewhere) will probably be $5,000 for several parties spaced out over several months, and everyone gets to celebrate with us. We also throw bangers, so this gives all our mates a night to remember, wherever they are.
It only occurred to her later that the settlement was a one time thing, but the loan she had to pay interest on. I'm pretty sure her ex had done the same thing, because they both talk to us about those payments. So essentially, these two completely destroyed their marital wealth just to get lawyers.
I don't know man? I think it'd be worth just sitting down together and working something out, but I guess a lot of people don't think that way.
But here's the kicker that occurred to me reading this article, just imagine the people that take out loans for the wedding, and the divorce.
Ouch.
On a broader level, specialized loans are where the money is at for lenders. When lenders know what people are aiming to buy, they can work with cottage industries that sell to that particular market and get kickbacks. I'm sure the next step for this is shit like wedding insurance policies, preferred vendor "discounts", etc.
Wedding insurance is a thing, because, of course it is.
I wonder if this increase is largely in people who in the past would've gotten married in their teens. By those people not getting married until they're in their mid 20s, they have access to the kind of debt that can blown on a fancy enough wedding. In lieu of feeling like you'll ever have access to the means to buy a house, you might not care too much about racking up 10-15k on a wedding.
The comparison between a $50k loan for a wedding vs a $50k downpayment on a home is that they never had that money to begin with, and the payments on the wedding are just another expense vs buying into a mortgage with all the extra costs alongside it.
I'm not claiming a loan for a wedding is a good idea, in fact I think it is a terrible one. But building off what you've said, that they're older and can make bigger financial choices, I can see how a loan for the wedding can seem like a viable option to someone.
I've met a few people who face social pressures from their family, who number in the dozens, to do things that appear extremely financially irresponsible from my perspective. If you have to choose between being responsible and not infuriating the 40 most important people in your life, I don't think that would be an easy decision to make. Go against the grain too many times and you risk having the family turn their collective back on you, which might be the best thing financially, but is still a terrifying prospect.
For me, having 40 family members (especially the ones whose opinion you'd care about) just sounds made up. And having family members pressure you into things you don't want sounds like a great opportunity to learn how to tell people to mind their own business.
Please note, I'm not judging. I can't even mentally put myself in that situation, so how could I judge? But also, it's hard not to notice that if somebody's 40 family members turn their back on them then their life would just become similar to the lives of mostly everyone I know (i.e. having 0-5 family members that care about you and that you care about).
Do I value having a huge, extravagant party for one day over starting out my marriage on a solid financial foundation, or other expensive items like childcare and housing?
Will I have the cash in the future? Will my earnings dwarf this expense and the additional interest I accrue while I work hard to pay it off?
Did I figure out for myself that this one-day event is "truly important to me" or do I just think it's something everyone does, and I have to do as well? Why is it important to me?
"Great idea!"
Is that how the conversation goes? I'm genuinely curious...
The priority in this case (for the subset the article is referring to, of course) is always expectations > practicalities like money.
"After all, you only get married once"...
It strongly suggests the other person is more interested in social status signalling through extravagant lifestyle display than in celebrating the partnership for its own sake.
But it is so important. We talk all the time about company and team alignment, but being aligned with your spouse matters so much more.
Whether or not any of these assertions are true is not questioned...
Although there are other factors involved, I think it is a great and unprecedented triumph of modern advertising that they can convince people to go into debt for unnecessary crap. Pretty terrifying, frankly.
It is also very dubious in its methodology. This is as close as that study gets to looking at raw, unmanipulated data:
"To begin, we compare annual labor earnings of full-time workers who worked more than 30 hours per week (or 1,560 hours per year). As shown in the top row of the table, average real full-time labor earnings of male heads of all households declined between 1978 and 1998 and then rebounded over the next 16 years. On net, real average full-time labor earnings for males increased 10 percent between 1978 and 2014. However, younger male workers appear to have been left out of the labor earnings increase. Specifically, the real average full-time labor earnings of a millennial male household head in 2014 were about the same as those for a 11 comparable male Generation X household head in 1998 and over 10 percent lower than those for a comparable male baby boomer household head in 1978."
"For female heads of all households, real average full-time labor earnings increased moderately between 1978 and 1998 and between 1998 and 2014, reflecting, in part, rising female educational attainment. However, the median labor earnings of female millennial household heads in 2014 were about 3 percent lower than those of comparable female Generation X household heads in 1998."
"For families, the data show that real income of married couples grew, on net, from 1978 to 2014; this trend is seen in the sample of all households and in the sample of households headed by individuals younger than 33 years old and likely reflects the rise in the female labor force participation rate and the increase in the prevalence of dual income households. However, the net growth of real family income was smaller for young married couples than for married couples of all ages during this span of years."
Aside from earnings and debt, for massive swaths of Americans there's been no better time to be alive than 2019. Violent crime, racism and sexism are at all time lows. Health care is expensive but much better than the past. Food is cheaper and there are healthier options.
My original point is the strongest though. There are no wars. I'd rather be in debt than have my arms blown off in combat or have to kill people, all against my will because I got drafted.
A lot of the most expensive places to live are also becoming some of the only places where career prospects seem remotely strong.