How much cash for a wedding gift? Post Reply

[Love lipstick]

Can anyone help with this? We have been invited to a wedding in a couple of months time. The couple have lived together for probably 3 or 4 years and have asked for money as a present as they have most household things - they want to put it towards landscaping their garden. Seems a great idea to me but how much do we give? There will be 4 of us going to the wedding. My husband who would prefer to buy a present for the garden rather than give money but is happy to go with the request is suggesting @ £150 Ias that would buy a lovely tree. I'm not sure that it enough given that there will be 4 of us attending? If you have had a cash request for a present I would love to know how much you gifted. 

[TFP]

At the risk of stating the obvious this is very much a 'how long's a piece of string' question, with e.g. the conventions at a royal wedding being very different to what you'd expect at a very modest affair.

So much depends on the means of the wedding couple [and families] & their guests, the amounts that guests have had to spend getting to the wedding, how much has been spent on the event, how close both sides of the wedding couple are to each member of the guest's party, and so on and so on... 

I suppose to me a 'norm' might be something like about say £25-£100 for a single guest plus another say £20-£50 per additional guest [regardless of means tending to err perhaps towards the lower end of this range if the additional guests are children]... so for four adult guests the norm might be say £85-£250... for two adults and two kids maybe more like £85-£160...

Obviously everyone who reads this thread will know at least one person, in some walk of life or other, who'd consider these ranges to be alarmingly high and at least one who'd consider them to be alarmingly low.

[Cr8nberry]

How much would you have spent on a gift if they had a traditional wedding list? Surely you just give the equivalent in cash? I don’t understand why it would be any different. 

[Needcoffeenow]

Most couples ask for money these days with young people often stating it is to fund their honeymoon. For recent weddings we have given £200 for a family of 5. If it was just husband and me I think we’d give about £100/150 depending on how well we knew the couple. If it was an older couple marrying or a second marriage I’d feel inclined to give a bit less than that and indeed for the last wedding we were invited to (divorced woman, widowed man) the couple themselves said no presents. BTW American weddings can state things like ‘buy us an experience for our honeymoon’ and list touristy things to do wherever they are going.
For the most recent of these we ended up buying ‘half a Tuscan cookery experience’ as the whole thing was £400!

[Torcat]

I think your £150 sounds ok. Hard to know without knowing more about the couple and your financial situation. I mean to a very wealthy person £150 might feel mean, but to someone hard-up, that would feel a lot. You are right, you could buy a tree or a gorgeous pot for that amount, so that is a meaningful amount. I wouldn't get too caught up in how many of you are going and working out a per head cost, it's a wedding, not a business arrangement.