The Cost of Attending all the Weddings

For those of us who move away from our hometowns to build careers and lives elsewhere, we will find and form groups of friends who hail from many different places. Most will get married either in their hometowns - to be close to grandparents for whom traveling would be hard or impossible - or they will have destination weddings. But whatever they/you choose - from Iowa to New England to the Napa Valley to Tulum - they will likely all be destination weddings for you. While that might not cost much when you're single and child/pet-free, the cost of attending these weddings goes up as your life become more complex. Taken together over a decade or two, wedding attendance can cost you anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.

So, what do we do? We either increase our income, we go into debt, we stay home and weaken our social ties to our community of friends, or we start having hard conversations among friends and family about what we want and what we can actually afford.

With the costs of housing, education, healthcare, and children quickly rising while the job market shrinks and wages stagnate, information is power as we plan and strategize the path toward our dreams.