They say diamonds are forever - and these days, thanks to digital cameras, so are wedding albums! Once upon a time, those precious photos used to fade as the years went by, but digital photos stay as crisp as the day they were taken.
But there’s one reminder of your big day you don’t want to take with you when you start married life together: debt.
At Debt Advisory Centre, we help people from all walks of life. We know there’s no single cause of debt problems, which is why we decided to look into the impact of ‘wedding debt’. We asked over 2,200 people whether they’d borrowed for their big day, and how it had worked out.
We learned a lot from our research. A full 17% of the married people we asked said they’d borrowed money to pay for their big day. 1 in 3 of those people said they were still paying it back, long after the confetti had settled. 1 in 2 said they regretted borrowing so much - or at all.
Which is not to say no-one should ever borrow for a big event like a wedding. In the right situation, it can help - but it’s very important you ‘do the maths’ before you go ahead and do it.
A few tips you might want to take on board if you’re thinking about borrowing…
1) Figure out the best way of borrowing. Different kinds of credit come with different pros and cons, so take the time to find out which one looks like the right one for you.
2) Figure out how much you can afford to repay per month, without putting your monthly finances under too much strain. Don’t forget: your finances are almost certain to change if you’re moving in together. So try to understand where you’ll stand financially after the wedding.
3) Don’t pay it back too slowly. A lengthy repayment term will cut the size of each monthly payment, but it’ll mean you pay more interest in the long run. Plus, if you’re planning on buying a house and / or starting a family, you won’t want to put your plans on hold for years until your wedding debt stops taking a chunk out of your monthly finances.
If you’re struggling with debts, wherever they’ve come from, talking to an expert can really help - you might find there’s a better way of repaying the money you’ve borrowed.
