Dear Queenie,
My daughter is planning to get married about a year from now. She wants a destination wedding in a place that is very far from where we live. My wife and I do not have a lot of money and we told her how much we can give her toward her wedding, but we can’t afford the trip to where she wants to get married and we refuse to go into debt for it and we told her that, but she just said we should find a way to work it out.
Queenie, I’m afraid this is going to be a problem in our family. What do you suggest?—Not made of money
Dear Not made of money,
Tell your daughter that you will deduct the cost of the trip to her wedding from the amount you are going to give her toward the wedding, and if the cost of the trip is more than you were going to give her, tell her you just cannot afford the trip at all and if she wants to have you there when she gets married she will have to get married closer to where you live.
She probably will have objections to all this, but just tell her as sweetly as you can manage that you are not “made of money”; how much you can afford to spend on all this; that it is up to her to decide how the money will be used; and that whatever she decides, you wish her well.
