You intended for your marriage to last forever, so you figured spending a few more dollars on the wedding wouldn’t hurt. Before you knew it, a few more dollars here and there added up to much more. In fact, you went well over the budget you and your spouse agreed on when you began the planning process.
Perhaps you had a few arguments about the cost before the wedding, or maybe your spouse gave in because he or she wanted you to have your perfect wedding. Now that you are married and reality has set in, you realize that the wedding put you into debt.
Is it really that much of a problem?
It’s actually more of a problem than most people realize. Lending Tree commissioned Qualtrics to conduct a survey that discovered that approximately 45% of recently married individuals between the ages of 18 and 53 incurred significant wedding debt. Of those couples, 47% considered ending their marriages due to money problems. On the other hand, only 9% of couples who did not go into wedding debt contemplated divorce due to money.
It is significant that the survey traced money woes all the way back to the planning of the wedding. An alarming 76% experienced disharmony in their marriages and as much as 36% tended to argue about money often, especially if they still owed someone from the wedding such as a caterer. Couples without debt related to their wedding had significantly lower feelings of disharmony and did not argue as money as often.
Money remains a touchy subject
If you are like others here in Elizabethtown, you don’t like talking about your debt with anyone, including the one person who probably needs to know the most. Money has always been a source of contention in marriages, and when a couple fails to see eye to eye about it even while planning the wedding, it may be a portent of things to come.
If you do find yourself contemplating divorce, you may want to take steps to protect your rights and gain an understanding of what happens during the property division phase of the proceedings. Your marriage may have started out on the wrong financial footing, but that does not mean you can’t get it right when you are about to start over newly single. A good way to do that would be to have a legal advocate at your side.