Bride Or Groom In The Forces? Wedding Insurance Gives Ultimate Defence

Insurers can be fickle beings. I know because I used to be an insurance underwriter for the largest insurance company in the world. When I say fickle, I mean they can appear to be pedantic slaves to the policy wordings and legalese. However, in their defence, this has come about due to the ever present danger of people trying to take advantage and make fraudulent claims, hence the reams of wordings on the back of policy documents.

With this in mind, we are talking today about a very narrow piece of insurance cover, i.e. military weddings.

Military weddings are not necessarily those you may envisage, for example those using full military uniforms or ceremonial swords and the like. Often, they are just one member of the armed forces marrying somebody who is not a member of the armed services, however, there are similarities in the types of wedding insurance cover required for these events to be properly protected by insurance.

Do not forget that a wedding involving a member of the armed forces is basically the same as a normal 'civvy' wedding especially in that any of the problems associated with a wedding apply equally to the two events. So, let us take a look at military weddings and see what we need to do insurance-wise.

Deployment

First off, let us consider a wedding where only one of the parties is in the forces. One of the main risks here is that the member of the forces can be drafted into active service at any time. This would obviously cause severe problems involving cancellation of the wedding and financial implications that would involve. There is sometimes a grey area here with standard wedding insurance policies, so you should make sure that your policy will cover cancellation where the reason is by way of one of the parties being deployed at the last minute. One thing to bear in mind here, which is very important, is that most policies will not provide cover if the party knew in advance that he or she was likely to be called up.

Ceremonial Swords

The second type of military wedding is one where the participants and probably most of the guests will be in full military uniform. Inevitably, this will involve the use of ceremonial items such as swords. Insurers are very twitchy about such items as there is a propensity for some kind of disaster to happen when these items are in the hands of people who are not used to handling them! If you are going to be having a wedding of this type, you would be well advised to check out a specialist policy with a relevant add-on. Some of these swords and the like will need to be insured up to £20,000, so do not skimp this type of insurance, always check with your insurer or advisor if you are not sure.