This applicant who resides in Santa Clarita Ca, is applying for a wedding loan. Her fiance’s family doesn’t have any money to contribute, and the young bride-to-be might have some money from her parents, but that is yet to be seen.

As you read her loan application submission, you can see that she is tied to the old ways of her family in that they are accustomed to having big weddings with all the trimmings.

These kinds of weddings are not as common these days because it’s so expensive, and in the eyes of this new generation, the extravagance is just not worth it anymore.

When you have a large wedding party, large extended family, and a massive group of friends, the wedding can be very costly – between $40,000 – $100,000.

Of course for the small minority of Americans that are wealthy (5%) they will spend upwards of $100,000 or more on their childrens’ weddings.

Today we are going present our loan applicant’s estimated costs for her wedding in the form of a table she sent us. This is an itemized list of expenses she and her young groom-to-be are expecting to incur on their way up the aisle to exchanging their wedding vows. Kind of makes you want to just take off and elope. 

After we have finished creating the itemized list of their wedding expenses, we will get into the nuts and bolts of their wedding loan. This will include a breakdown of the principal, the interest rate(s), the length of term, and the fees associated with opening the loan. This is very much a personal loan which is unsecured. There is no collateral mentioned in the loan application.

My personal advice to the bride and groom would be for them to only invite the wedding party and immediate family. This would save thousands and thousands of dollars, and they would have a wonderful wedding. Maybe not a lavish wedding – but they would have a VERY special day, and take home allot of pictures that they could cherish forever.

The bride’s credit rating is not very good and the groom has recently declared personal bankruptcy. He is discharged from bankruptcy, but he will not be able to be a co-borrower on the loan application.

As a personal example, I got married in Hawaii. My husband and I were all alone with the Preacher at a beach side hotel lobby. All of Lewers Street was our aisle. A perfect stranger was my bridesmaid and my husband had a best man that we found relaxing near a small water fall in the lobby of the hotel. The weather was beautiful, and we were beautiful. Our photographer was another friendly stranger who had a good camera. She took all of our wedding pictures and later sent them to us. She was from San Francisco.

Wedding Loan Application Submission (Applicant is Bride)

Type of Loan - Wedding Loan

Why do you need a loan? - For our wedding. Both my fiance and I come from families that have big weddings, but my fiance’s parents lost everything in the stock market, so we need to get a loan so that we can have the kind of wedding we want. I know it’s not a MUST to a have a big wedding, but it’s always been our family tradition, and we want to remember our special day.

My fiance and I have been living together in Santa Clarita for 5 years now, and we both grew up in Los Angeles (Pasadena to be exact). We need an unsecured cash loan for our wedding day, and I have attached a work sheet/checklist for all of the expenses we will have. This list also shows the percentage of each expense - which is handy.

How Much Do You Want To Borrow? - Between $40K – $50K

Length of Employment - Over 3 Years

Time at Address - Between 18 – 24 Months

Age - Over 21

Anything else that would help us get your loan approved - I hope you can help us, but I need you to know that my credit isn’t very good. My fiance just claimed personal bankruptcy from his last marriage and divorce, so as far as credit goes I’m the only with a credit rating and it’s not very good. Please help us – we will pay back every last penny to you at the interest rate you want.

We can afford to pay between  $1000-$1200 per month to pay off the loan over time. I assure you that we can make every monthly payment on time and in full.

Sex - Female

Marital Status - Single

Ever Claimed Bankruptcy? - No – never

What State/City/Town is your primary address in? – Santa Clarita, California

Have you checked your credit report lately? - Yes

Would you consider your credit rating to be? - Poor

Collateral? - No

Down Payment? - No

Do you a have co-signer or co-borrower? - No co-signer yet, but I’m working on my Mother and Father. My fiance’s Mom and Dad are the ones that lost everything in the market. They’re very embarrassed about it and our family said we would pay for everything.

Employment Industry - I’m a nurse’s aid and have been for over 3 years now. I love my job, and it is a very secure job. We are always short staffed, and there are not many trained and certified nurse’s aids in Santa Clarita.

Loan Applicant’s Itemized List of Wedding Expenses

Our applicant has presented her expenses for her coming wedding in a nice little table, showing the total cost, each expense – including the percentage of each expense compared to the overall wedding budget. As below;

Now that the applicant and the lender can see the complete breakdown of expenses, the application process can go forward – hopefully with a final approval of the wedding loan, and a full disbursement of the money to the bride-to-be’s checking account.

Wedding Loan – Principal, Interest, and Term

Below are two tables;

• the terms of the wedding loan
• the calculation of payments and interest

Wedding Loan – APR, Principal Term and Payment Schedule

These are the final numbers on the wedding loan. Note the high APR on this financing; 

Wedding Loan – Amount of Repayment, Total Interest, and Biweekly Payments

This is the monthly payment on the wedding loan over a period of 10 years; 

Wedding Loan Conclusion

So we see our married borrower(s) are indebted to the lender for a total of just over $62,000 dollars over a period of 10 years.

The new married couple are paying the lender back in biweekly payments of just under $250 every two weeks, and close to $500 a from their monthly living budget.

Notice how the interest on this loan is quite high, coming in over $22,000 dollars! This because the borrower never did come up with a co-borrower on the loan, and was forced to proceed with her bad credit rating. The loan is unsecured, and her FICO score turned out to be lower than what she disclosed on her application form. Her FICO was 625.

Because of her poor credit score she was forced to except an APR (annual percentage rate) of 11%. With this kind of credit rating, you should be rethinking your plans to have a big wedding. Maybe save your money, forget about any kind of loan, and fly off to a tropical destination for an extremely private ceremony. You could even consider inviting close family and friends to a destination wedding of some kind – somewhere on a Caribbean island perhaps?