Wedding Insurance Articles

As the wedding season hits full stride most couples have failed to insure their big day.

The average cost of a wedding this year will be £20,000 – one of the biggest payments a couple will make in their lifetime, but only 1 in 4 of these weddings will be insured, reports Datamonitor. 100,000 weddings will take place in Summer 2010, but 3 out of 4 will be financially vulnerable as a result of supplier failure or cancellation due to accident or illness.

Why are so many uninsured?

Many people have never heard of wedding insurance. It’s becoming more well known, but has only been widely available since the 1990s.

It’s a cost that many people decide to cut – given that you can get £20,000 worth of cover for around just £70, this may be a little short-sighted.

Some people struggle to find the cover they need – if you have a partner in the forces who may get deployed, or are having a wedding abroad, you may presume that you can’t get cover. It’s harder to find, but many providers do cover these weddings.

What does wedding insurance cover you for?

Wedding insurance will pay for rescheduling your day if you have to cancel due to and accident or illness of the bride, groom or their immediate family. It will pay lost deposits in the case of supplier failure (if a supplier goes out of business or doesn’t meet their contract for example). You’ll also generally be covered on the day for damage to the wedding dress or hired suits or loss or damage to wedding presents.

Nothing can take away the stress and heartache of dealing with a problem with your wedding day, but at least you needn’t be left out of pocket.

Everyone wants their wedding day to go off without a hitch and many take out wedding insurance for protection against the worst case scenario. While wedding insurance covers a great many things, there are some things it does not cover, such as divorced parents meeting at your wedding and arguing or the bride hating the choice of best man.

When considering the buffet or sit down meal at the wedding you may wish to give some thought to children and vegetarians. Maybe offer alternatives for those who do not eat meat and offer finger foods for children.

Give a great deal of thought to the seating plan. Do not sit Aunt Bessie next to Aunt Dora if they hate the sight of each other. Meet with your estranged parents before the wedding and ask them to make amends if just for your wedding day.

While you may want the groom to take part in the wedding plans, unfortunately some men just aren’t interested. Rather than risk falling out why not let your mother or best friend help you instead when planning your wedding.

Wedding insurance can come in handy if you are let down by venues, photographers or numerous other things, but only you can protect yourselves against some things that may ruin your big day.

There are numerous advantages to getting married abroad. Typically if you choose a hot and sunny place to get married then you can be sure of getting great weather. If getting married in Switzerland then usually you are guaranteed snow. However there are times when things to not go as planned and the weather you thought you were going to enjoy for your wedding, turns into a nightmare. This is when you may wish you had taken out wedding insurance.

Inclement weather is just one of the many things that are covered in wedding insurance. For example say you are going to Barbados for your wedding and honeymoon. You expect to be married on the beach in the sun but when the time comes to fly out there, Barbados is in the middle of a hurricane. Your wedding party cannot fly out and the wedding must be postponed and reorganized. In this case if you’d investigated wedding insurance and taken out cover you may be able to claim for the money you have lost and re-plan your wedding for another date.

Without wedding insurance you typically have to cover the costs yourself and pay out again once you have rebooked your wedding.

Your wedding day is a once in a life time event, for some anyway. As it is a special day many people also take advantage of taking a once in a lifetime holiday for their honeymoon. This usually involves leaving the UK and flying to some exotic location half way around the world. While usually you enjoy your honeymoon in hot sunshine, sometimes the weather can turn out to be unkind and in some cases it could ruin your honeymoon or mean you have to cancel it and book elsewhere.

When you take out insurance for your wedding, if you make a wedding insurance comparison you may find a policy that covers not only your wedding for adverse weather conditions, but also the honeymoon. Of course you may have to pay out more in premiums, but if you are planning on going somewhere exotic, it may well be worth the small extra cost.

With wedding insurance you do not have to worry about your wedding or honeymoon being a financial disaster. If your honeymoon is blown away due to a hurricane and you have to re-book you may be covered. Without wedding insurance you may lose many thousands of pounds and be unable to re-book your dream honeymoon and have to suffice with a week or two in Windy Blackpool if you are lucky.

Perhaps the question should be can you afford not to take out wedding insurance. While no one likes to think of the worst case scenario, the worst could happen. If it happens on your wedding day this is the worst possible time for things to go wrong and it can be the most disastrous financially.

Insurance for weddings is affordable as there are numerous types of policy and levels of insurance you are able to take out. With this in mind you are able to compare wedding insurance online to ensure that you get an affordable policy that comes with the benefits you want to cover.

Could you afford not to have wedding cover if the total cost of your wedding was thousands of pounds and you had to reschedule the wedding? Could you find money to cover everything if your vendors were unwilling to give you some leeway? If you have to rebook and repay for such as cars, photographer, venue and everything else you pre-booked, you may lose your original deposits or even the full sum if you paid in full. This could add up to quite a sum of money.

Wedding insurance would typically help you to recover costs if you had to cancel or reschedule your wedding due to one of the events covered in the insurance policy.

There’s certainly something to be said for working in the wedding insurance industry. You hear a good many astonishing tales, giving you plenty to talk about at dinner parties. In fact, I’m on the lookout for one or two wedding insurance people to come along to my next dinner party – we could all do with a few extra horror stories to enjoy.

A favourite report I heard recently involved the wedding cake – that monstrous heap of potential disaster which almost no one ever eats and even fewer people enjoy. This particular couple, who will remain nameless as I still consider them my friends, decided to save money and rather than have a full tiered wedding cake, would only have the middle tier as a real cake, with the remaining tiers just cardboard covered in icing.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but with all the excitement and emotion when it came to cutting the cake the Bride and Groom sort of forgot. The top cardboard tier was carefully placed on one side, and the middle tier placed on the other. The knife was then posed over the top of the lower, fake tier, with the photographer helping to distract the happy couple from the impending disaster.

The time came to cut the cake. The Bride plunged the knife in with far more vigour than the cardboard could withstand, slicing straight through the Groom’s thumb, resulting in blood dripping all over the Bride’s dress and hysterical pandemonium for some considerable time afterwards.

Fortunately the wedding insurance covered the cost of the professional cleaning required to expunge the Groom’s blood from the dress, and for the cleaning required to remove the blood from the pale cream carpet at the venue. Still, at least they remember their wedding day, which is something.

If you’d like to avoid becoming the subject of someone’s dinner party horror story, why not check out the latest wedding insurance prices at http://www.compareweddinginsurance.org.uk/

If you haven’t yet sorted out your wedding insurance, then sit back, relax and enjoy the following tale of a couple who, like you, had no wedding insurance. Sarah and Michael had organised their dream wedding. It was to be a fantasy wedding in Cyprus, with a beautiful ceremony in a quaint little chapel, and then a reception on board a private yacht. They decided not to take out wedding insurance as they already had travel insurance, and felt that health insurance, home insurance and credit card protection would all be enough to plug any gaps should the worst come to the worst.

They arrived at their hotel, excited, tired and rather hot. Their condition wasn’t helped when they were told that the hotel hadn’t quite got the booking right, and that they’d be sleeping in a twin room rather than the double they’d booked. They dejectedly humped the beds together before going to have a look at the venue. The venue had no idea who they were, and no recollection of any booking. After some frantic verifying of details it transpired that the venue had booked them in for next month, not this month, and already had a wedding party in so were unable to offer them the venue until the following week.

It couldn’t have got much worse, except that it did. There was a fire on board the private yacht and it was no longer available for the reception. Some couples would have got the hint and decided that perhaps fate was trying to tell them something. Some couples would have called their wedding insurance company and had them cover the cost of rescheduling everything. As it was, Sarah and Michael had to use the deposit they’d saved up for their first home and accept that their first few months of married life would see them still living in separate homes. Now, about that wedding insurance policy you didn’t think you needed…

According to research published at the weekend, only 1 in 3 couples planning their wedding purchased a wedding insurance policy for their big day. Those that did purchase wedding insurance spent an average of £46 on their cover which works out as less than a quarter of one percent of the average wedding cost, currently around the £20,000 mark.

The study, carried out by cashback giant Quidco, surveyed 1,079 UK adults aged between 18 and 64 who had either married in the last 12 months or who were engaged to be married. It found that only 1 in 4 were now using credit cards or a loan to fund their wedding, with the vast majority (84%) relying on savings or getting a contribution from family or friends (60%). A third had asked relatives for practical help such as making the wedding cake or invitations.

Despite the general economic downturn, it would seem that prospective Brides and Grooms are not compromising with their wedding arrangements and at the same time are getting creative with ways of financing their big day to avoid having huge loans to pay back.

Indeed, at only £46 the average cost of wedding insurance is little different to the cost of feeding just one additional guest. As with any non-compulsory insurance policy, you need to work out whether it’s right for you or not. But it’s perhaps worth looking into though, just for the peace of mind.

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If you’re thinking about wedding insurance, and particularly if you’re thinking about the possibility of a wedding abroad, you may be wondering whether you really need a separate wedding insurance policy if you already have both health insurance and travel insurance in place.

Clearly if you’re going abroad you’ll have travel insurance sorted, and you may be aware that your credit card provider offers an insurance scheme of a kind whereby purchases over a certain amount made using the card are protected under certain conditions. With all the different insurance policies and cover arrangements do you really need to fork out yet more money for a separate wedding insurance policy?

Well to start with health insurance and travel insurance may be vital, but they won’t even scratch the surface as far as covering the wedding itself and the many aspects relating to the arrangements you have made for the day. If you’re ill while abroad your travel insurance and health insurance will cover the cost of your treatment, but if it means your wedding has to be delayed, then you’ll have to pay for all of the costs involved in postponing it yourself.

If a service provider gets things wrong, goes bankrupt, double books or makes any other kind of mistake, which is perfectly possible if you’re relying on arrangements made months in advance with someone on a different continent, then you’ll have no other protection or safety net other than a wedding insurance policy. Quite apart from these grave risks, the phrase ‘forking out’ can’t really be attributed to wedding insurance when policies are available for less than twenty pounds!

Travelling abroad for a wedding in another country should be a magical experience you’ll remember forever. Having a wedding insurance policy in place could just be what’s needed to make sure your wedding doesn’t turn into an experience you’ll never forget.

You don’t really think you need wedding insurance do you? After all, you’re not the unreliable type are you, and as for your family and friends – well, surely it would almost be considered an insult if you felt you had to take out wedding insurance because you couldn’t entirely rely on them?

Wedding insurance is for those people who, unlike you, have rather chaotic lives and families who are even less reliable. Thank goodness you’re able to relax a bit. And by not buying wedding insurance you’re saving yourself enough money to put an extra couple of bottles of wine out on the tables at your reception. Now that’s sensible budgeting!

Of course, you’ll be absolutely fine, because wedding insurance claims are few and far between, and only for real emergencies that can’t be predicted. As long as you can safely and easily ignore a few trivial facts you’ll be fine, and will have a great time with those extra bottles of wine. Just to help you on your way, here are a few facts that you can start ignoring straight away, just to help get things started.

First of all, ignore the fact that your wedding is probably costing around £20,000, with no safety net. Also, ignore the fact that every year statistically about half of all weddings result in a claim in the UK. Ignore the fact that each year thousands of businesses go bankrupt, make a mistake with bookings or simply fail to turn up, and ignore the fact that last year the total amount of money paid out to couples in the UK for problems with the venue would make a lottery win seem like peanuts.

Oh, and whilst you’re congratulating yourself on having such a stable and reliable family, try to ignore the fact that in the UK last year 50,000 wedding insurance claims were as a direct result of accidents caused by wedding guests. Now, with all that out of the way – go and have a great time!