Wedding insurance is it a waste of money ?

Sometimes it seems that wedding insurance is just another way the insurance industry has worked out how to extract more money from us. With car insurance, health insurance, home insurance, travel insurance and strawberry jam insurance, there seems little left to insure.

Wedding insurance can often seem to be something of a waste of money, and since weddings are expensive enough already, isn't it just another unnecessary expense that you can easily skip? After all, it's not as though you're driving a car on a motorway with millions of other people, or entrusting your home to the elements and would be thieves.

A wedding is a happy, glorious occasion, and the people present are your family and friends. They wouldn't let you down, or let anything bad happen. But even if things do go pear shaped, you've still got health insurance and home insurance for your possessions, and you may even have remembered that items such as your rings were purchased on your credit card, meaning that they're protected by your card provider's complimentary insurance policy.

As you consider all of this, and remember that the cost of yet another insurance policy could well be the difference between having an extra guest, or a few extra flowers, or even another few bottles of wine, you may start to lull yourself into a sense of security, and leave it for now.

Over the months your wedding grows and your bank balance shrinks, and perhaps you have a few momentary worries about whether you should have taken out a wedding insurance policy, but you keep leaving it until a little later - there's no hurry after all, the wedding is months away, and you could easily take out a policy anytime you like. Let's see how things go.

Time ticks away, your plans start coming together, your bank balance continues to fall, and you start to think that perhaps you have invested quite a lot in one single occasion, and it all feels a little less certain and a little less safe than it did in the happy days months ago. But with the budget shrinking so rapidly, you need to leave some spending money left for your honeymoon, and some cash just in case.

So you don't take out wedding insurance, and you once again reassure yourself that it will be all right - nothing will go wrong, and even if it does the chances are high that one of your many existing policies will cover you.

Does this all sound either terribly familiar, or terribly like the sort of path you can see yourself taking? If so, it may be best to take a moment and realise a few hard facts, because whether you like it or not, weddings are not merely about love and romance. They're military operations with huge budgets and a very shaky foundation.

You enlist up to a dozen separate companies, caterers suppliers, businesses and the venue, any one of which could let you down by getting things wrong, getting the order wrong, the date, or even going bankrupt or double booking themselves.

Think it won't happen to you? Neither did the 50,000 couples last year who faced just these sorts of situations, every one of which resulted in huge expenses putting things right at the last moment.

Could you afford to replace your wedding cake if it got damaged in transit? Could you replace the rings if they got lost or stolen? Could you pay for the repair to one of the hired suits if it got damaged? Could you quickly find the money to pay for a new limousine or carriage if there was a problem with the one you had originally planned? Could you cope financially if one of the main wedding party members was taken ill and the whole event had to be postponed?

If you're in any doubt at all about even just one of these questions, do yourself a favour and get wedding insurance sorted. Once it's done you can sleep a little easier, and then you only have to worry about the Best Man's speech and remembering your partner's name correctly when it comes to saying the vows.