Bride and GroomI remember my early days as an insurance underwriter mainly for the multitude of people offering me advice. Most were platitudes, but there were some pearls of wisdom that I carried with me until the day I retired. One in particular was always at the forefront of my mind especially when I started looking at, and writing about wedding insurance. The advice was basically to think about the very worst and most ridiculous things that could happen to instigate a claim, double it and make that your starting point to assess the risk! That may sound a bit daft, but it saved my bacon many times throughout my career.

One of the most enlightening things was to look at previous claims and see if you could see any sort of theme running through them. I recently uncovered some remarkable events associated with weddings and wedding insurance, like the couple who had to cancel their wedding TEN times! Yes, then times for various reasons, too many to write here, but reported by the Daily Mail newspaper. They were obviously extremely unlucky, but even one of their cancellation could have cost them a fortune had they not had the foresight to take out wedding insurance beforehand. Although I bet their insurers did not feel the same was in the end!

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Another case highlights not only the tenuous nature of the services and other wedding items that you often have to pay for in advance.

The bride in question went to pick up her wedding dress two days before the wedding day. She had paid in full for the dress. When she got to the shop, it had closed down. Not only had it closed down, but the owner had taken all the stock and her wedding dress as well. She had to go out and buy a dress ‘off the peg’ so to speak, costing her hundreds of pounds extra. Later, her father tracked down the shop owner, who had opened up again elsewhere and had the cheek to have the dress in the window. Because the business was in administration, it was felt that she had little chance of recovering the dress. Eventually her father did manage to get the dress back, but it was now after the event and there is little chance of them recovering the £1,200 it cost.

Getting even sillier, we have the case of the bride who, the night before the wedding, hung the dress too close to a light fitting and it was badly scorched, too late to do anything about it, although their insurance did pay for it to be repaired later. In another odd case, a marquee was ‘broken into’ and the heaters were stolen and the cake knocked over; again, insurance paid for replacements heaters and re-icing the cake. Finally, and the funniest I think, was the case where the groom took what he thought were empty boxes to the tip, only to find that the rings, shoes and some attire were still in them!

Now that is why you need wedding insurance!

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Article written by Chris