An upper middle-class wedding on the coasts at any venue goes for a minimum of 30k. A really cheap wedding is just having in your back yard with a keg, but I don't think the OP is talking about that. A nice wedding with all your college buddies, looking at 100k.
I assume you people are all in the heart of San Francisco or something, but that is still legit insane. [edit] Also, I don't think you can still call a wedding "upper-middle class" if it's 6 digits. Holy moly. I'm shook
An Indian wedding in Southern California can easily cost $120k+ given the number of attendees, the sizes of the venues required, the food, the white horse...
The second one; marriage isn't free. Even at the courthouse.
When my wife and I married we made a profit on our wedding but we set a reasonable budget for it.
I would love to know how you made a profit on it. (That's not a snarky question at all - I have a child likely to get married next year, and I would genuinely like to know.)
They really buried the lede. There are two things happening here that can arguably be traced to one cause: Educated millennials apparently see marriage as something you do _after_ you've finished establishing yourself. It is a goal, not a given. Uneducated millennials apparently have the _same_ point of view, but they aren't established and therefore they aren't getting married. Given that marriage often means you en…
> Given that marriage often means you end up with the lower of the two credit scores Does anyone actually think this way?? Honestly I can’t imagibe ever thinking financially when I proposed.
The credit score remark is a reference to losing half your assets and/or taking on your partners debt if things go wrong.
I don't, but it is at the bottom of the article so maybe the author can back it up?
I think what I was responding to was the implied causal connection between the lack of an "institution" of marriage causing instability in cohabitating adults. The article and linked research don't make that assertion.
I found a few articles that back up that assertion.
I don’t think 3% inflation is affecting anybody’s willingness to have children. Do you have a source for that?
3% isn't much, but over, say, 20 years of constant 3% inflation, that's 80% inflation total. Now this is just a quick math example and it's not the real situation, but it goes to demonstrate that over time inflation has a large effect. You could argue that over time this huge effect of inflation along with the stagnation of wages makes it so that people can't support previous standards of living, including supporting…
Real wages (inflation adjusted) have been stagnant. Nominal wages have gone up at roughly the rate of inflation for the most part since the mid 1970s.
speaking as a millennial there is a big reason Marriage is overtaking divorce. Health insurance. Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare. Seriously, thank the gig economy. Affordable Care Act providers either do not exist in some states or are overpriced/worthless for what they do cover. There are still roughly 25 states that have not expanded medicare either. Getting married is a quick and simp…
> Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare. Is this true? I hear people say things like this but "most"? Seems too high.
With the rise of contracting in IT, I think more and more people have crappy insurance. I didn't realize how bad it would be when I started contracting last year. The agency I was at only gave it after 90 days and it was $450 a month for a pretty high deductible ($3000) plan as a single person with no dependents. I ended up going back to full time and a major reason was the healthcare.
> Most of us dont have jobs that afford us competent healthcare. Is this true? I hear people say things like this but "most"? Seems too high.
Seem correct. I know my health care would have doubled this year from $800/mo to $1544/mo so I found another plan at the same price as the old one but it covers much less.
I guess I see stuff like this:
> The percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or part of 2016 was 91.2 percent, higher than the rate in 2015 (90.9 percent).
And I wonder if, while still very important, people take debates like healthcare and needlessly inflate the numbers to overemphasize the problem's impact.
That comic is fake news. I can't find the source, but the Economist made a pretty good graph with good data demonstrating that when you control for certain factors, poor people and people with measured below average IQ definitely are more likely to have children. I saw the graph I'm referring to a couple years ago on the Economist website.
I think you're missing the point of the comic. Yes, it's absolutely possible that you could measure this effect but worrying about it won't help and attempting to "fix" it will almost certainly backfire in hilarious and/or terrifying ways. See China.
You avoid China by not forcing people to do things they do not want to do. Here's a likely way to reverse the trend: give free birth control and abortions (no questions asked), government subsidized child care, government subsidized college tuition, and higher tax incentives for marriage and having children. The largest obstacle for rich and generally high IQ women to having children is lack of money and lack of practical child care. A huge reason that poor people and generally low IQ people tend to have more children is lack of sex education and lack of access to birth control and contraceptives. This is a completely peaceful, non-violent way to reverse the trend. And just so we are clear, this assumes that you already think that humans who tend to be rich or have high IQ scores have genes worth propagating. It's not hard to avoid Chinese atrocities when you keep yourself from thinking that you are so justified that people should be forced to live the way you think is correct.
3% isn't much, but over, say, 20 years of constant 3% inflation, that's 80% inflation total. Now this is just a quick math example and it's not the real situation, but it goes to demonstrate that over time inflation has a large effect. You could argue that over time this huge effect of inflation along with the stagnation of wages makes it so that people can't support previous standards of living, including supporting…
Real wages (inflation adjusted) have been stagnant. Nominal wages have gone up at roughly the rate of inflation for the most part since the mid 1970s.
There are only two good reasons to do that: - You earn your living based on social connections to rich people, making the wedding a business expense. - $250,000 was pocket change that you happened to have on hand. If you had to save money in order to pay $250K for your wedding, that was a large and obvious mistake.
Well, my uncle / her dad paid for it. Her dad is very wealthy (likely close to $10M USD net worth.) The sad thing: she got divorced 3 years later.