Are You Covered on Your Wedding Day?

Your wedding day is often one of the largest expenditures you will make, short of purchasing a home. You would not consider spending as much money on a car or a home without insuring it. Why will you spend that much money on a single day and not insure yourself?

What will you do if your venue has a catastrophic fire just a week or two prior to your big day?

What happens if your wedding cake arrives and is not at all what you ordered?

Who pays the bills if one of your guests trips over the DJs cables to the speakers? Who pays for the shattered speakers or the guest's shattered ankle?

Do you have any protection if your guests get food poisoning?

Your destination wedding is cancelled due to a hurricane? Who is going to cover that costs as well as the cost of doing another wedding?

One of your vendors goes out of business and files bankruptcy, keeping your deposit and unable to fulfill their contract. Who pays to hire another vendor?

Where do you go to these situations covered? Is there such a thing as wedding insurance?

For a one-time premium you can be covered for these situations. Often the premium is a percentage of your overall budget. Usually the insurance does not have a deductible.

Wedding insurance can protect you from a lot of different situations. The following are some of the situations covered by wedding day insurance:

Clothing---lost or damaged is covered. Repairs or replacement of the clothing is covered. If the clothing shop goes out of business prior to delivering your dress or tux, you will be able to recover your deposits.

Venues---ceremony and/or reception site goes out of business or is destroyed by natural disaster. Deposits and all fees paid so far are covered. Some venues require couples to provide coverage in the event their guests damage the venue.

Severe Weather---hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, floods are all weather situations that can impact a wedding day. Non-recoverable costs can be covered if you have to postpone your wedding due to any of these circumstances.

Liquor—some policies include coverage to protect you against lawsuits arising from alcohol related issues.

Catering-food poisoning is not something anyone wants to think of on their wedding day. However, if your guests end up sick, you want to be sure their medical expenses are covered. If your caterer does not show up you want to be able to quickly provide suitable food and that added expense can be covered.

Military call up---if one member of the couple is called to active duty or has their leave cancelled and it impacts your wedding, the costs associated with moving the wedding day can be covered.

Any one of these situations can result in unexpected expenses totaling thousands of dollars!

We actually had a situation arise for one of our couples recently. They had spent months planning a beautiful destination wedding. The wedding had been planned with a local planner at the destination, including steel drummers, decorations, cake, officiant, ceremony written and approved, dress purchased, tickets purchased for all the required travel. They were on a cruise with their best friends and part of their family. The remainder of the family was going to met them at one of the ports of call. When the ship left one port to head to the wedding destination, the captain announced that due to the path of the hurricane they would not be going to that particular island. Their itinerary was changed! The family who was to meet them at the port was in transit and could not be reached. What were they to do? What were their options?

What did they do? How did they end up getting married? They began planning the new wedding as soon as they returned to the US. Since they were already planning a large reception to celebrate their wedding in the islands, they decided to use that opportunity to actually get married. We met and wrote a brand new ceremony to reflect the new location and the events that had occurred. They purchased new clothing to accommodate the change in climate and setting.

This cost them several thousand dollars due to lost deposits and expenses related to the island wedding coupled with the expenses of hiring a new officiant and related expenses to getting married in North Carolina. Fortunately, they were very flexible and delightful in their dealing with such a disappointment. I was honored to get to work with them, but felt very bad about the circumstances of our meeting. I hope they had wedding insurance to help recover some of the expenses!

To be sure that you are covered on your wedding day we recommend you talk with your personal insurance agent to see what coverage they provide. If they do not provide wedding insurance we recommend Gene Martin at All Choice Insurance in Greensboro, NC