Control Your Cash Mailbag!

Financial freedom for the price of a stamp

Financial freedom for the price of a stamp

Real letters from real readers. Send yours to info @ ControlYourCash . com.

Dear CYC:

My fiancé and I are getting married! We know that destination weddings can get expensive, so we’re going to do it close to home. The problem is that he and I can’t come to an agreement on some of the most basic parts of the wedding. Like the venue. I want to hold the reception at the ballroom in a local 5-star hotel ($12,000), while he wants to do it at his father’s yacht club ($13,000, but my fiancé claims the view of the lake is awesome and there might be a party boat involved.) Which do you think is better?

Sincerely, Melinda in Broken Arrow

 

Dear Melinda:

None of the above. Either is a giant and needless expense.

Here’s how you do a wedding, assuming you’re not a trust-fund punk. First, go to the county clerk and get a marriage license for $60 or however much it costs. Then pay your priest/minister/rabbi whatever his going rate is, which is probably not that much. Finally, hold the reception at one of your parents’ houses. If your mother and mother-in-law want to help they can go to Costco and buy those giant packs of hors d’oeuvres.

One more thing. It’s probably too late for this, but don’t register anywhere. Find a tactful way to say “cash gifts only” to your invitees. One way to handle that is to just say nothing, and when they realize you aren’t registered they’ll probably take it upon themselves to discreetly hand you an envelope at some point during the evening. You might even end up making a profit on the deal. But yeah, do it on the cheap. This is one place where frugality makes tremendous sense.

 

Dear CYC:

My fiancée is driving me crazy. She’s already made a non-refundable $6000 deposit on a ballroom for our wedding, and let’s not forget the $5000 I spent on an engagement ring. I make $40,000 a year. And now we’re – I wouldn’t say arguing, but heatedly discussing such details as the wedding invitations. Did you know engraved vellum paper goes for $1.50 per invite? Multiply that by 200 and you can see what just one of our problems is. Beef medallions on the dinner menu vs. chicken for $1 a plate cheaper, it never ends. What do I do?

Sincerely, Brian in Broken Arrow

 

Dear Brian:

$11,000 in sunk costs already? Man. Another $7 won’t kill you, so you should buy our book and figure out how to build wealth instead of destroying it.

Also, it’s 2013. Why are you sending invites via any medium other than email? You know how much an email invitation costs, right?

Are you going to be one of those couples who never talk about money until it’s too late? It’s cool if you are, just know that you’re already well on the path to sitting across from each other at the kitchen table a couple years from now, she furrowing her brow and you staring at the readout on a Casio printing calculator, wondering why you’re so broke and whether you’ll have to move into a studio apartment once the baby arrives.

 

Dear CYC:

Well, your advice is certainly condescending. And unrealistic. You seriously expect me to have a discount wedding? Should I get my dress from Goodwill while I’m at it? Maybe you don’t understand how important this is and how deep our love for each other is. My wedding is going to be THE most important day of my life, and the idea of it being no more ceremonial than a Super Bowl party is offensive to me. I asked you a simple question about one venue vs. another and instead you start pontificating. Thanks for nothing, ass.

Sincerely, Go to Hell

 

Dear Melinda:

Why did you ask for advice if you didn’t want advice?

Let’s do this Socratically. Would you say that most people a) worry about money, or 2) live with the freedom of knowing that they have sufficient cash flow and a big enough nest egg to see them through anything – financial independence, to coin a phrase?

This part of our conversation is unilateral, but we’ll answer for you. Obviously the answer is a). We’d guess that they outnumber the people in the other category at least 9 to 1. Now…would you believe, or at least be open to believing, that there might be a correlation between the plurality of people who have traditional weddings, and those who end up in the first category?

This is the ultimate in short-term thinking. Your wedding day. DAY. Singular. One of maybe 25,000 you have ahead of you. Why on earth would you focus all your attention, and undue money, on a single day when doing so means hampering your ability to build wealth over the remaining 24,999?

If your answer is “Because every girl dreams about her wedding day and I’ve been fantasizing about this since I was playing with Barbies,” then you’re a moron. It’s a non-repealable law of the universe that you can’t have it all. Everyone has to make choices. Even the biggest individual expenditures are done with respect to other possible outlays. Carl Icahn just borrowed $5.2 billion to attempt to take over Dell Inc. He didn’t go for Lenovo, or Acer, or even a company that does something other than manufacture computers. Icahn thinks that’s the way to get the best return for his (or his lenders’) money, so he acts accordingly.

We know what your objections are before you make them. How can we compare something as cold and utilitarian as a business deal to the magic and emotion of a wedding day? Because whether you choose to accept it or not, when you indebt and/or impoverish yourself to get married, there’s still a transaction. Multiple transactions. And as far as the people on the other side of them are concerned, business is business. The wedding planner, the hall, the florist, the caterer, the DJ etc. all get paid. In money. By you. And your heirs, if you let your bills sit long enough.

Also, the math doesn’t work out. You’ve got at least a 40% chance, conservatively speaking, of getting divorced. Yeah, we know. You two are different. (Also, we don’t know why the Centers for Disease Control with its $11.3 billion annual budget, an agency originally created for the narrow purpose of fighting malaria in the Southern United States, ended up being the nation’s official recordkeeper of marriage and divorce statistics.) An average wedding costs around $26,000. Even the most degenerate gambler in the world wouldn’t place a $26,000 bet on a game where there was a 40% chance of losing it all and a 60% chance of…well, still losing it all.

It is astonishing how many adults we meet who insist on handicapping themselves at the onset regarding money. Everyone with even a passing interest in personal finance will tell you how important it is to save early for retirement – why, if you just sock away an extra $10 a month starting when you’re 21 instead of waiting until you’re 40 you’ll have a billion more when you turn 65, or something. Yet none of these people will advocate something more obvious and even more impactful: Not blowing $26,000, and forgoing the assets that that could buy.

Still, most people aren’t going to listen to this. For a completely unrelated reason, most people aren’t wealthy.

Who are you trying to impress?

These two hate each other, but at least they didn't spend $30,000 for the privilege.

Skirts and malleable men, this one’s directed at you. Spending money on a wedding is one of the surest, most effective ways of getting your financial life off to a treacherous footing. The average American wedding costs $30,000 from ring to honeymoon. And despite their effervescent exteriors, wedding planners are among the most opportunistic agents in all of commerce. They know that you’re the best kind of customers there are – people who are too terrified to concern themselves with budget, for fear of looking cheap. Especially in the eyes of their betrothed.

If you’re young, and getting married at the traditional age, then you don’t have any net worth to speak of yet. Or at least, you don’t have so great a net worth that you can afford to “invest” some of your valuable assets in a ceremony that doesn’t pay any returns. And if this isn’t your first wedding, act your age. You already had your shot at glamor and pageantry. Treat this wedding like the requisite business transaction it is.

A wedding is not only a perpetual spring tradition, it’s an obscene commitment of time and money, in exchange for breadmakers and fondue sets you will never, ever use. You’ll also get photographs that there’s a 34% chance you’ll end up ceremoniously ripping in half within a few years. If we told you that your $30,000 car had a 3-in-1 chance of getting clobbered by an asteroid (Note: insurance policy does not cover acts of asteroid), would you buy it?

There’s another argument we haven’t demolished yet, the microtine one. Your best friend from college invited you to her wedding, and she had jugglers and dancing bears. Elton John sang and played the piano, and the entrée was fricasseed Yangtze River dolphin, swimming in a reduction of alba truffles and Château Mouton Rothschild sauce. Every guest got a gift bag with a Krugerrand inside.

If you take your friend’s lavish wedding as the benchmark that your wedding needs to meet or exceed, then welcome. You clearly made it to ControlYourCash.com by mistake. Stick around for a while, maybe you’ll learn something. Although it’s going to require more than a little deprogramming.

Here are two appropriate ways to get married – the first if you’re religious, the second, if you’re secular.

Go to your parish priest, minister, rabbi, or local fat woman who could never meet men and calls herself a witch. Then rent out the church on a Saturday/synagogue on a Tuesday/coven during the daytime. Ask the celebrant what the going rate is, then give an extra 10% in recognition of all the money you’re saving by not getting married in the conventional and dimwitted way. (Of course, you’ll be paying with cash or a check.) Invite as few friends and family as you can get away with to the ceremony. Here’s an unquestionable truth – with the exception of your mother, no one wants to be sitting there anyway, in uncomfortable clothes on a perfectly good day when they could be out enjoying life. It’s a social obligation all around, so don’t you owe it to everyone to at least make the event as painless as possible?

If you absolutely need to celebrate with friends, meet at a local bar and convive. Rent out a nearby yacht club if you still can’t convince yourself that you need to spend some amount of unnecessary money in order to properly embark upon married life, which is going to be enough of a struggle as it is. Yes, your adorable niece can still be a flower girl. Let her parents buy her dress, though.

For females, if you feel that having a modest wedding is denying yourself some ritual of womanhood, shake yourself. Most rituals of womanhood are overrated anyway. Care to relive the first time you wore heels? How about menarche?

You know what? Go ahead and splurge on the honeymoon if you want. Seriously. You’re going to bitch about how Spartan the wedding was anyway, so at least this way you can justify your innate need for self-indulgence.

If you’re not religious, find a justice of the peace or a nondenominational minister who does house calls. Hold the ceremony at someone’s parents’ house. If you want, put the bride’s most pathetic friend in charge of ordering flowers (2 dozen, no more) and calling a caterer (two entrees, max, and not salmon.) Said friend probably has lots of free time on her hands anyway, so you might as well put it to use.

Princess Beatrice and Joey Buss can be as ostentatious as they want and charge it to their parents’ credit cards. For the rest of us, a wedding isn’t meant to be a display of our family’s legacy. It’s a financial liability, however obligatory, to minimize the impact of. Freeing up important resources for you to buy assets with.