How much cash gift is appropriate for friends’ wedding with children invited?

[Thought23]

Attending a wedding in the summer for friends. We met through our kids. We’re all invited ( 2 adults + 2 kids). Venue is about 2 hours from us. Wedding on a Monday so day off work. We won’t be staying over as hotels were £400+.

How much cash for a wedding gift is the going rate these days? Don’t want to come across cheap!

What about a towel bale instead?

Takes me back to the days of wedding gift lists.

Towel bales are so useful! Nowadays couples seem to have everything they need, though, they are rarely starting a new life together.

I agree, and I was annoyed when I was expected to pay £300 for a christening to cover the meal (£125 per person) plus a present (£50).
However, there has to be some sense of proportionality. If someone attends a birthday party for a big birthday, that would probably cost them £50 (for a bottle of wine and present). So 4 people going to a wedding (which implies they are close to the bride and groom) with the equivalent of a bottle of wine and a small present between them is cheap.

But if two of those people are children, surely that's reduced?

It’s a wedding gift not payment for a meal!

So only people with a large budget can accept invitations to a wedding?

Sometimes but rarely there's a free bar for s set period of time but usually it's just wine with the meal and maybe a glass of something fizzy on arrival

It’s the same in my Eastern European country (or at least it used to be when I lived there). People had to borrow money to attend weddings and going to weddings became a duty - you had to attend because someone from their family had come to your wedding in the past. It was a type of mutual lending - when you got married you bought a house with all the money you received at your wedding and over the course of your life you’d go to weddings and help other young couples buy their homes 🤣.
When I was a child the custom was to ‘’call out the gift’’ at weddings. Someone would go around collecting money from guests and announcing it loudly for all to hear. The parents of the newlyweds set the tone, the more they gave, the more the other guests had to pay. You could, of course, pay less than everyone else, but that would be embarrassing. But there were also cases where you’d pretend to give a big gift, but have the money returned to you by the bride and groom (if you told them you were struggling).

A quick search on Google and online forums shows that the wedding gift currently starts at £500 per couple! 🤣

While I do think that the above practice is absolutely horrible and the amounts expected insane, I do struggle with the lack of generosity in the UK and in the west in general. Not just around weddings but in general, birthdays, dating, etc. It does seem to be the case that the richer a nation is, the less generous are its people. I don’t want to generalise, all the people in my social circle are kind and generous, but I have also encountered people who would attend a birthday party or a dinner party and not bring a chocolate or bottle of wine.

I think a lot of people would indeed rather not attend at all than be accused of being tight. I know that sounds crazy. I myself have certainly not gone to weddings I wasn't super bothered about because of the expense of it which has to include a generous gift.

That's sad. Imagine if you were low waged or unemployed 😥

Even taking cultural differences aside, I would consider 50 pounds a pretty insulting amount for 4 guests. More like what you'd put in a card if you were going as a couple to a birthday party with sandwiches and sausages, not a sit down 4 course meal with drinks, entertainment, etc.

Mostly people won't miss out on the really important weddings, it's more the cousins or boyfriends football friends wedding that people occasionally swerve. These days, Ireland is a pretty wealthy country in any case and the gift is the least of it. I was at a wedding a few years and out of maybe 150 women there I reckon I was one of a handful that hadn't at least had their hair done, everyone was spray tanned near enough and plenty of professional makeup too. And what looked like new outfits top to toe. Irish weddings are generally pretty bling.

How many weddings does the average person attend in their lifetime? Given how expensive weddings are, being invited to a wedding suggests a level of closeness with the bride and groom. I really don’t believe that the guests are, on these rare occasions, truly unable to afford a decent present (or cash equivalent). In the previous example, £50 for 4 people is only £12.5 per person! If you take into account the amount they save by not eating dinner at home that day, they’d be spending less than £10 per person on a wedding gift for someone they’re close to. It’s a wedding, a one-off event (hopefully) for the happy couple. ‘Save the dates’ can go out many months in advance, so saving £5 per month from the moment they accept the invitation would ensure they have enough for a decent present.

But you are not paying for your dinner the other guests are family surely a couple giving a gift of £50 is better than nothing.

Yes, but the meal IS being paid for the couple getting married who you know and care for. It is costing them per head, if you weren't going it would cost them zero. No one is saying you have to cover your cost as such but some relationship between the cost of having you at the event and the scale of the gift is surely normal.

Ah, yes, I didn’t pay enough attention to the original post, my bad! So it’s only one family, not 2. In that case £200 does feel expensive….but if I was the guest in question I couldn’t pay just £50 for my entire family no matter how tight money was, I just couldn’t - my Eastern European upbringing would kick in 😄.

£150

I’m also from a southern European country like a PP, and yes we are expected to cover the meal and then gift some on top. For 4 people, I’d be giving £400-500 at the very minimum, if the couple aren’t close to us. Last wedding I went to (attended alone) I gave €200 to the couple, we’re good-ish friends (150 cash, 50 in an experience voucher relevant to the friendship).

We were poor growing up so yes, often that meant not attending the weddings we got invited to. Sometimes my parents went alone (child-free weddings not really a thing), or only one of them in representation of the family, to keep costs down.

However, it is also customary for the invitations to arrive 12-15 months before the wedding, giving people plenty of time to plan and budget as much as possible. I’m attending a wedding in the UK in July and I’ve only received a save the date so far - it’s driving me mad. I cannot commit to buying flights, booking a hotel and budgeting for a gift until the invitation has arrived!

I love how different cultures do life events (marriage / death) so differently. I think we might be closer culturally to the Irish - big weddings that everyone attends and pays for, big funerals within 2 days of the death happening and where children and adults of all ages congregate to say goodbye to the deceased as part of life.

Exactly!!

But it’s rarely about affordability, it’s more likely about people being tight.

At the last wedding I went to (an all day wedding wirh breakfast, lunch, dinner and free bar) the people at my table were all high earners (£100k per year). They took advantage of the free bar but were talking about gifting £50 per couple. I have no words

Not normal to me. The amount of money I would give is based entirely on my relationship with the people and how close we are, not what they have chosen to spend on their own event.

I'd have found it really intrusive and unpleasant if any of our guests had tried to work out what our wedding cost and had that inform their choice on how much to give as a gift.

So despite the invitation saying so my presence isn’t really present enough.

I’m married to an Italian and the gift culture there is very similar, and one definitely matches the plate cost. My MIL made a note of how much everyone spent on the gift lists, and each time one of these relatives’ children got married, she consulted her list and we had to match it. One aunt spent a crazy 1k, so we of course had to do the same. Thankfully everyone has married now!

There was a high disparity between an English couple giving, say, £100, and an Italian couple £250.

DT’s are now of the age of attending numerous weddings of their friends. Thankfully their friendship seems very sensible and invitations include a message of “no gifts or money please. Your company to celebrate our wedding is more than enough. If you really want to make a donation, our favourite charity is x, who would appreciate any donations “

That's what we did - but all the Irish guests still gave us money and gifts!😂