We saved for wedding as well as college and retirement. But I have no idea how common that is.
We didn’t save for a wedding for our DD and now that she is engaged, it is really a strain to find money here, there, and everywhere to pay for it. Of course, ideally one would save for a wedding, but who knows if they will ever marry or marry really late or want to just do a quiet courthouse wedding. It is so hard to predict how much you will need and when you will need it.
Even being in the middle of wedding planning, I still wouldn’t know how to advise other parents to handle this. It really depends on personal situations. For example, in our case the future in laws are contributing nothing, but when my niece got married everything was split fifty/fifty. I am envious of that!
We haven’t really saved in particular for our kids’ weddings, someday in the future. We pretty much have continued to live below our means and find that we are saving more than we anticipated so we would be able to help our kids when they’re ready to buy a place, marry, etc.
We sleep well at night when we spend less than we earn.
I don’t know there is a boss. We own a business together and he does sales and bills and I run the office.
He does the day to day money but I’m the long term planner and saver.
He actually taught me how to cook when we got married. He grew up with a working mom so if he wanted to eat, he cooked. He did his own laundry and was a real neat nik. I grew up with a sahm and I never learned many practical skills.
He does the laundry because he’s so particular. We cook 50/50, he does all the outside work, and with 5 acres that takes time. He’s more mechanical. I decorate, make the plans for vacations and socializing. One time he actually said, did you ever notice how the whole house kind of matches?
We have the unspoken agreement that only one person gets to freak out or fall apart at a time, and it’s generally been me.
I can’t think of a time we didn’t agree on something big. Whoever cares most wins, but I can’t think of a time we didn’t fundamentally agree.
No one is the boss. We make decisions together, but we do divvy up chores. Before kids we really did just about everything together, but after kids I was home full time for a while, then half time, then I worked at home so cooking ended up being my job except dh cooks most breakfasts and is in charge of the espresso machine. (It was my birthday present, but it’s more of a present if he makes it. 
) We do laundry on the weekend. I usually sort it, but we fold it together a job I despise. We do a big shop for groceries on the weekend on the way home from the gym, both of us pick up stuff during the week, because I don’t meticulously menu plan the way I used to. All decisions about house additions and furniture are made by me with his okay. He pays the bills every since I went through a period of sending them in late too often. He rakes leaves and mows the lawn (though some years we’ve hired that out), I do all the rest of the gardening. Most of the paid gardeners around here are too dumb to take care of a perennial bed. He buys the car he commutes with, the Mommy vans have been joint projects. Investing we talk about together. Sort of. We both can’t get ourselves too interested in it. The money I earn goes into Index funds. His 401 goes into more of a mix. There’s some money I inherited that gets managed by a firm that seems to work miracles. We are convinced that one day we are going to discover they are Bernie Madoff’s Boston Brahmin cousins.
In my family, those getting married pay for their own weddings. This is the same for both my poor and rich family. Sure, parents may help some but it comes out of current funds and not some sort of saved money. But we have small weddings and there’s not a huge emphasis placed on weddings/marriage. Heck, I have two cousins who have been in relationships for well over a decade, with kids, and no plans on getting married any time soon.
My wedding was a group effort, split between DH and myself, my parents, and his parents. It was nevertheless failry modest, but also quite lovely.
We have already saved money for our daughters’ weddings. We wanted to give them their educations and a nice wedding so that they can start their careers with no debt at all. If finances had not been in place for this, our focus would have definitely been on their education. As it is, we are lucky to be able to do both, and are happy to do so.
Somehow I think the youngmen/women today tend to get married much later than my generation (if getting married at all.)
I got married within 2 years after college. One of my relatives has been together with his long time girlfriend for almost 9 years, and it appears they still have no specific date and plan for getting married.
Somehow I think that if DS and his GF are together for more than 5 years and still have no plan for marriage, the parents on both sides would not be very pleased. (But we do not want to be the ones who give them “pressure”; ultimately, it should be up to the young couple to decide.) I actually heard that at one time, the parents of his GF had tried to be a match maker right after she was graduated from college. (DS was not together with her at that time.) It is likely that they do not continue this “effort” just because she and DS are a couple now. (Hopefully, it won’t become a long distance relationship especially in the current stage of development. Knock! Knock!!)
We really do not save for the wedding specifically. We just hope we could set aside some “after-tax” money (instead of saving money exclusively in a pre-tax account.) It is somewhat similar to saving for the emergency fund outside of the retirement account which we are not supposed to touch before retirement.
I like to think we are equally yoked.
In our family, it’s always whoever cares the most about whatever it is that is in charge. It’s worked very well for us and we rarely disagree. That said, I mostly handle finances, legal, educational, vacations, and medical issues, as well as cook. H mostly does maintenance, cleaning and driving.
I was not sure, so I asked Mrs. DecideSomeHow. I was told to get back to work. Still don’t know who is boss . . . .
We are on vacation right now, and one kid (adult child) asked the other something about our plans. The other kid said there’s only one person here who has any idea what we are doing (that would be me). My husband and I both work full time, and we both do housework and grocery shopping, but I probably do more of the long term planning. (He thought he was going to fund his daughters college education with his retirement… So that’s probably a good thing). We don’t make any big decisions without consulting the other, but I tend to come up with ideas, and he says “no,” and then eventually we generally do whatever my idea was, or something similar. I generally do the planning for vacations (we decide together where we should go), because I’m better at getting good deals and doing research. I figured out where we should live, because I was willing to do research. But he has full veto authority on most things. We work pretty well together.