Tell your daughter a dollar amount that you, as her parents, will give her for the entire wedding, and what remains after she pays all the expenses is her gift.

From our personal experience this was great! Our daughter treated the money as if it was her own and hunted down every bargain! In addition, it reinforced the concepts of budgeting and organization and helped to sharpen her negotiating skills. Best of all, she came in under budget, thereby providing herself and Richard with some immediate cash!

From Don’s and my standpoint, it was the final lesson that we as parents could teach her in the area of life skills! We have always been delighted with her using her many God-given abilities, so her wedding was a triple treat to us - one, to see her so happy (marrying the man of her dreams), two, experiencing the very positive end results of her skillful and meticulous financial planning and three, cementing our loving relationship with her, unencumbered by episodes of confrontations that often happen during the pre-wedding stage of life between parents and the bride-to-be! If you think this helpful to others, please pass it along. Don and I will definitely be taking this approach with our other three daughters!