Three Things To Consider Before Your Wedding

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Three Things To Consider Before Your Wedding

So, you are engaged to be married. Preparing for the wedding can be an intense, expensive, physically and emotionally tasking experience. As prospective newlyweds, you might be drowning in to-do lists as a result of the wedding planning process. Additionally, you might be bombarded by unsolicited advice from friends and family about your wedding and marriage in general. However, there are three considerations that most people usually don’t talk about that may be worth considering before your wedding day.

Legal Barriers to Marriage

Before you start making wedding plans, it may be a good idea to figure out if there are any legal issues getting in the way of your nuptial plans. For example, a marriage is legally invalid if one or both prospective spouses are already married. This is because bigamy is prohibited in all 50 states.

This issue isn’t about whether you or your significant other are hiding a secret family from the other—although having a secret marriage implies even larger problems for the two of you down the road. However, in cases of remarriage, for example, a person might believe they completed the divorce process even though they haven’t. This might be especially applicable in cases of do-it-yourself uncontested or semi-contested divorces where neither party was represented by an attorney.

Prenuptial Agreements

Of the three considerations in this article, this is usually the most challenging one to address. A prenuptial agreement—also known as a premarital agreement—is a legal contract that prospective newlyweds enter into before getting married. Prenuptial agreements usually govern how property and finances are treated when a marriage ends through either death or divorce.

Because prenuptial agreements are primarily concerned with matters involving the end of your marriage, most couples never seriously consider one, understandably. Some couples might bring the idea up only to dismiss it as inapplicable.

However, a prenuptial agreement can potentially save you time and money in the future, in case your marriage doesn’t last. It can also help you and your significant open up about a hard-to-face issue and share your feelings, opening up opportunities to strengthen the relationship by getting on the same page on important considerations.

Wedding Insurance

By the time they’re already deep in the stages of wedding planning, couples have never heard about wedding insurance. Like other forms of insurance, wedding insurance helps protect couples against the risks of having a wedding ceremony. While this might seem funny to some people, weddings are very expensive, even for modest ceremonies. If some unexpected disaster strikes, forcing the parties to cancel a wedding and postpone it for a yet-to-be-determined future date. It is very likely that a couple might have sunk a significant chunk of change, making the prospect of rescheduling the event cost prohibitive.

For example, imagine that a couple invest substantial time in money and the wedding of their dreams only to have a severe storm close down the only roads to their ceremony site and reception location. The couple cannot recoup the cost of catering because all the food would spoil. If the storm inflicts significant property damage on elaborate decorations or sound and lighting equipment, those vendors may not be inclined to undo the transaction or are not in the financial position to do so.

Wedding insurance covers the risk of loss for a number of things that can go wrong in wedding, including:

  • Severe, unexpected weather conditions
  • Vendor cancellations
  • Damage or inaccessibility to the wedding ceremony and reception sites
  • Serious injury or illness, including death
  • Work-related occurrences, such as job relocations and military deployments
  • Accidental damage to property, such as wedding attire
  • Personal liability for bodily injury to guests

In a sense, throwing a wedding is as much a trial by fire for the prospective newlyweds and it is a celebration. The stress of planning a wedding can be so intense that some relationships do not even survive the planning process.

Importantly, wedding insurance policies exclude cases of “cold feet” and pre-wedding jitters. Generally, wedding insurance benefits are meant to compensate couples for losses they sustained from events out of their control. Insurance underwriters are not willing to pay out benefits losses stemming from a person’s change of heart.

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