A question that we get from a lot of clients as their children start to get engaged or are looking to get married, and that is - “How can I pay for my son’s or my daughter’s wedding?” Or “How much can I chip in and leave my financial goals intact while helping them out with the financial burden of the wedding?”
I would say - the earlier you can start saving, the better. Oftentimes, people might come within a year or so and say, “My daughter is getting married in nine months. How much can we afford to pay for this?” If you know that’s something that you want to gift to your children, from an early age, then start saving as soon as possible.
What you want to do is avoid having to pay for all of that yourselves. You want to let the stock market appreciation, the dividends, the capital gains - all the stock market gains, over a long period of time, pay for part of the wedding. So the earlier you start saving, the better.
What I typically recommend is a monthly contribution to a brokerage account. That’s going to be an automatic investment every month, when you can afford it, or maybe when your child is the age of 10 or 12, depending on how much you want to spend on the wedding - you invest that contribution every month and let that money grow so that when you are putting in $200, by the time your daughter is planning her wedding, that $200 might be worth $350 now.
The greatest part about investing in a normal brokerage account is that you can use that money for anything you want. So, if things change - if you don’t want to pay for the wedding, if your child says that they would rather you spend that money on their future kid’s education for college - you can do that. You can allocate that money to anything. There’s no rule that you can’t change it; if circumstances change, you can use that money for anything you like.
Planning for a wedding is exciting, but it’s just one part of your bigger financial picture. If you’d like help balancing family celebrations with your long-term goals, the team at Summit Wealth Group is here for you. Reach out anytime—we’d love to help you plan with confidence.