Your Wedding is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life...

.. and that means financially as well.

I just got back from what had to have been yet another $40,000 wedding. It seems nobody elopes anymore. Remember the last time you got an announcement three weeks after the fact gladly proclaming, "Doug and I got hitched by candlelight in a private ceremony attended by no one but our religious leader and our parents. No gifts, please."? Me, neither. Bad economy and all, people still feel entitled to their Big Day. The wedding industry is out of control.

How did this happen? When did ice swans become mandatory? I know a girlfriend in college who went three years without a date. Nice girl, attractive, just worked a lot, and not a social butterfly. She's getting married in Antigua in July. "What?! " all her college friends said over lukewarm Rolling Rock beer in the back yard, "Anitgua? She couldn't find a groom three years ago, now she needs a passport to marry him?" Why so complicated? And pricey? I promise you, no one who reads this article's grandparents even toyed with the notion of getting married in Antigua, unless they lived in Antigua, and that generation remains more married than the rest of us put together.

I'm a girl, and still, a wedding, not a celebrity wedding, just a regular old "we both work in accounts receivable, dated through college, still own a futon" wedding strikes me as astronomically high. I wanted to scream at the bride, "Isn't this excessive for somethng that at best has a fifity percent survival rate? Don't you know you could buy a house with this money?"

Fortunately, my hubby saw the evil glint in my eye, and whisked the champagne out of my hand. So I'm left here to talk to my would-be brides out there.

Listen, honey, I get it. Everybody wants her own special day. But that one special day could be parlayed into a thousand special days if you used your wedding money as a down payment to buy a house. Little tip: a wedding, while fun, is not an investment. A house is.

And your friends and family will thank you forty times over if you spare them a trip to Antigua to do what countless generations of fiancees did locally our of necessity for thousands of years.

Not sold and still need help with that down payment for a house? Tune in tomorrow, when I give first-time home buyers a primer in ways to find that down payment for that first house. Where did you leave that again? Oh, yeah, under the melting ice swan...