5 Ways to Be Financially Aware During Wedding Season

I recently read three different articles about the unaffordability of attending or participating in people’s weddings. In that same week, my husband and I had to discuss the fact that even to attend a local wedding, we’d have to cough up around $200 for a babysitter. Cleaning out my desk, I collected all the recent invitations for weddings we couldn’t attend and calculated that, if I were to send a gift for all of them all at once, it would cost about $1,500.

In an article for xoJane.com, one woman writes of having over $4,000 in debt from being a bridesmaid in two weddings for women with whom she is no longer even friends. Staggering costs like these led another woman to decline every single out of town wedding invitation she received, as described in an article for the Washington Post.

The recent outcry over the cost of traveling to a wedding demonstrates that even if the couple getting married is trying to be thrifty, just getting there in decent clothing is not an affordable experience for their friends. A recent American Express survey found that the average cost to attend a wedding (before the traditionally-expected gift) in America is $673, up more than ten percent from the previous year’s average.

And it’s often not just the wedding. There is typically a wedding shower and a bachelor or bachelorette party. Baby showers often occur soon thereafter. For people in their twenties and thirties, this can make friendship incredibly expensive. The cost of these important life events is without a doubt a first world problem. But it’s a first world problem worth doing something about, because friendships are essential, and being present for one of the most significant events in a friend’s life is important.

How can we do this while maintaining our financial equilibrium? Thrift, after all, is an important virtue, and it can’t just fly out of the window every time another friend gets married. Here are a few ways couples getting married can ease the financial burden on their guests:

This article originally appeared on Acculturated

More from Acculturated: