Maybe you could send them a sweet note saying that you had intended to donate to their fund but once on the site you were moved to make a contribution in their names to a much needier cause – namely, your own GoFundMe campaign to defray the costs of your travel to their wedding! 
That would combine the most popular gift giving trends!
I love nottelling’s suggestion.
I was feeling grumpy about GoFundMe today. There was an obituary in today’s paper for a person with a family in his 50’s. They asked for donations to GoFundMe to defray funeral expenses. Um, if you are so poor you can’t afford a funeral, maybe dial back the funeral, visitation, coffin, hearse, cemetery plot thing a bit? Maybe a simple cremation would do? Am I the only person left in the world who has an emergency fund and life insurance? Maybe I’ll start a GoFundMe for people to buy me toilet paper because I shouldn’t have to spend my own money on it.
I’m contemplating a GoFundMe to go to Bora Bora.
I live in an area that still does Dollar Dances at receptions, and huge cash gifts are given at graduation. I really didn’t blink at this idea. Especially because they are an older couple, they probably don’t need another toaster or place setting, but those extras on a honeymoon would be great.
I was much more offended when a rather wealthy classmate on a full-tuition scholarship of DS did a GoFundMe to pay for her semester abroad.
I checked out Gofundme just the other day because I was wondering how much it costs. The answer to my question apparently is 8%. They take a fee of 5% plus a processing fee of 3% which adds up to 8%. The reason I looked into this was because I was thinking if I learned of a worthy cause, perhaps by reading a sob story, and I was moved to give money, I would prefer to send the needy people a check rather than have 8% of my gift skimmed off the top.
In the process of my research I also learned that gofundme is often used as a scam, wherein any third party can start a gofundme page for some other worthy cause. For example I can start a gofundme page to benefit that poor baby you read about in the news who has cancer and was recently orphaned. But there is no oversight that would force me to pass the money along to the subject of my page.
I know one of the books that is making grand rounds in kids my daughter’s age group (late 20s) is The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I think many people of that generation are deciding to adopt a lifestyle of less material things (or minimalism). Instead, they might use their money and resources to experience things - they see those as creating the kinds of memories they want to have, as opposed to lots of clutter. And many of them, who have delayed marriage, already have a lot of what they need to launch a household. I, for one, applaud any effort that encourages less stuff, and more experiences with those who are important in their lives. This is really a new attitude I’ve adopted and is evolving over the last six months or so of my life. I can’t believe the amount of crap we got when we got married that is still sitting in our basement - that we never used. And some people may be able to say, “Well it’s not hurting anything in the basement.” But to me, it’s one more thing that I ultimately have to be responsible for, whether I’m using it or not. H and I are in the purge stage and it feels so good. There are very, very few pieces of anything I can look at and think, “I really don’t want to give that away because so-and-so gave it to me for our wedding, and they are so special to us.”
Now, I probably wouldn’t use a website like GoFundMe or such, only because I know they take a percentage of what I donate, but I have really shifted my views about couples asking for money to help them create memories doing the things they really love doing. I just don’t want a third party profiting off my gift.
Good to know. I’d bet there is a lot of scamming going on with these GoFundMe campaigns.
While I don’t necessarily have a problem with giving cash for weddings, I think Honeyfunds and GoFundMe requests are tacky. So many honeymoons seem to be foreign travel now. I sometimes wonder if it’s a “keep up with the Jones” sort of thing. When young people hear about (and see pics of!) others’ exotic honeymoons, they think they must do the same.
I don’t see what the difference is between giving cash and giving money through a website like honeyfund. I just checked the honeyfund website, which seems very different from gofundme – honeyfund is free, no money seems to be taken from either the couple or their guests (unless you use a credit card).
We recently went to a wedding where we were directed to honeyfund. My husband and I loved the idea that we paid for the couple’s tickets to a baseball game and Sumo wrestling match in Japan. I realize that we didn’t actually buy the tickets, but I felt as though I was giving a gift that matched both my preferences and the couple’s.
The New York Times recently did a story on this – here it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/fashion/weddings/passing-on-wedding-gifts-millennials-prefer-cash.html. Many couples offer both traditional registries for us older folks and the online honeymoon fund (apparently there are home improvement and fertility treatment options, too) for younger guests. The article makes the point that most Millennials have no interest in traditional gifts like expensive place settings, or live in tiny apartments with no space for the gravy boat.
Even Emily Post is OK with this: “When couples already have china, crystal and silver, their wish list changes,” said the etiquette expert Peggy Post, the co-director of the Emily Post Institute in Burlington, Vt. “The nontraditional registries are fine as long as couples suggest and not demand money.”
My daughter recently went to a wedding where there was no gift registry – anywhere – either for items or for cash. She made the assumption that she didn’t need to give a gift. We got into an argument about this – I told her she needs to do something. Unfortunately I can’t force her to give a gift, but it really bothers me that she’s not listening to me. But then romani says many of her guests didn’t give gifts and she didn’t care, so I should probably give it up.
Now, why this couple used gofundme instead of honeyfund or simple registry is beyond me. That’s the part that is tacky.
Call me old-fashioned, but I am bothered that when I don’t receive a thank you note. I gave a gift at a recent affair, and the woman thanked me nicely the next morning. That was fine. But I mailed a check with a card to another young relative. The check was cashed, but no e-mail T-U. Or anything.
I think gift registries were created with businesses in mind, not to make life easier for families. GoFundMe requests skip past the polite veneer of the gift registry, which at least has the appearance of someone else doing the asking, by taking out the middle man and making a direct appeal for cash. Whatever happened to quietly asking a family member or close friend about what the couple needed or wanted? I’ve bought things off of friends’ registries (although I don’t care for them), but I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to contribute to a GoFundMe account. I would, however, enclose a check in a handwritten card with our best wishes.
One of my problems with a GoFundMe type donation is that I don’t want the fees. These sites often asked the donor if he is willing to cover the fees (so the recipient gets the full $100 say, instead of losing the 5-8% in fees)
I’d rather just write a check for $100 and then no one is paying any fees.
Book mom, it was the new rude thing but not related to age. I have not spoken to a relative that I went to a wedding and wrote a large check, this was a while back , before 2000. She was one of my favorite cousin. Not anymore.
Bookworm, etiquette seems to be a thing of the past. Unfortunately.
I had no idea gofundme skimmed 8% off the top. Just another reason never to give any money in any fashion but directly.
I have a friend who found an artist’s page who was raising money. He wanted to do a 3 month sabbatical somewhere to study something and you could help fund his trip. There were gifts given for certain donations, say, one of his sketches on a cocktail napkin if you donated $50 or whatever.
The phrasing was such that people would feel not like they were just throwing money away for another’s person’s life experience, but “choosing to fund” at a certain level “while the option is still available”.
Unbelievably, my friend was disappointed because the funding levels she wanted to donate to were all full! I think all his levels filled!
It’s important to step back and remember the words of P.T. Barnum at times like this. There is nothing wrong with giving money but there is something wrong with being suckered out of money.
My daughter lives in the UK, yet her wedding will be here in our home state. She obviously will not be able to take many gifts back with her, so she plans to do a wedding fund website; don’t know which one. Cash is preferred so she doesn’t have to deal with U.S. funds and the transfer fees attached to putting the money in her UK account. I believe the site she is using, or maybe she is using one site for her US guess and one for her UK guest, will go to her PayPal account. As the wedding is not for another 13 months, she is still working on this!
@snowball – we need to keep each other posted. D lives in Europe but we will have the wedding here in either 6 months or 12 months depending on their performance schedules (two musicians). Though I would normally classify the honeymoon fund or cash options as crass, I really do not envisage other options. They are not completely “set up” domestically and in better circumstances they would LOVE a few household items. I told her I am gifting her a little extra cash so that they can have and informal party/reception for their friends and colleagues there and those who want to bring household gifts might do it then. I don’t like to tell people how or what to give as gifts, but I think at this point we may have not other option.
When young couples are not registered, i think most people figure out a check is the way to go. I don’t think there’s a need to set up a fund through a third party website.
There’s always the indirect, slightly disingenuous approach, which has been used quite effectively by my young relatives who were recently married.
When I asked the bride’s mom where they were registered, she said, “Frankly, I think they would prefer cash because they are not yet settled, but they don’t know how to communicate that without sounding crass. Any suggestions?” I then happily brainstormed about how they could get that message out.
I am now starting to think that that WAS the brilliant solution for getting the message out – when friends and relatives ask about gift registries, ask for advice about how to get the cash-preferred advice out to others!
Last year my sister-in-laws brother finally got married to his longtime partner. They’ve had a house together for at least 20 years, but could only recently get married. They asked to help fund a honeymoon instead of gifts and while I might normally think it tacky it made perfect sense really.
That said, all my favorite wedding gifts were not the things I had on our registry, but instead the ones that my friends gave to me because they liked them and thought I would do. My SIL gave me a set of chef’s knives which I have used every day for 31 years, my best friend from architecture school gave me a bud vase which lives in my kitchen and frequently has a flower in it, another friend gave me a 1950s complete coffee set which is so ugly it’s great, a friend of my parents gave me a tiny vase that is wonderful for little wildflowers or herbs, and hd’s boss gave us a wonderful tray with inlaid leather.
One of my best childhood friends’ mother couldn’t make it to our wedding but she sent me a lamp I had always liked as a child. I had totally forgotten about that lamp! We still have it. It is 60’s modern - quite futuristic looking.
My family has always done something like a gofundme for weddings. My mother’s side of the family is very large. I have met half of my grandmother’s siblings (6 of 13), so weddings were large affairs which could range from 50 to 300 people. Family members would help pay for portions of the wedding and the a program at the end would recognize those who helped pay for the wedding hall, band, dress, keg, etc. It helped to pay for the large weddings and no one went broke.