$25,000 Wedding Reception or Downpayment on Home?

You can't escape the news. The sky is falling and leaving investors and homeowners scurrying into little tunnels under the ground to escape the debris. Before you seek therapy on how to avoid the financial crisis of late, take a moment to consider your real financial condition. Do you have investments in the stock market? How liquid are your assets? How much debt do you have? Is your job relatively safe?

Do you really need to dump tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding reception when you're still living in your grandmother's basement? And no, "but she's 10 years away from the nursing home and then it will be all mine," is not an answer.

Most newly engaged couples spend 12-18 months planning for one day. Even if parents are paying a portion of the bill, which is becoming more the exception than the rule, many hours of valuable time are spent determining how much of your valuable money should be spent. Somewhere on that honeymoon flight over the Atlantic, you and your new spouse will be sipping $10 champagne from a plastic glass wondering, what have we done? No, hopefully it won't be the marriage you regret; it will be the wedding. Credit card debt will ensure that any hopes you have for upgrading your current living conditions will be put off so far into the future that not even a science-fiction author can predict how the world will operate and whether or not cars can fly.

Before you plan the reception, plan for the week after your wedding and ask yourself where you want to be. If "stuck under a brick ceiling of revolving debt and ridiculously high credit card interest rates" then shoot for the moon! If your answer is a little different, then do some budgeting and figure out just how much you have to spend on your wedding day, and realistically plan for the rest of your life. Where you're going to live and how you're going to get there should be more of a priority than "should the flower girl wear a tiara or fairy wings?"