Adam and Jodie Davies wanted a big wedding. The couple from Swanscombe in Kent had great plans for their special day, and were keen to do it before they bought a house or started a family.
After getting engaged in Mauritius they put down a £3,000 deposit at a venue in Yalding near Maidstone last July and set about saving for a day that they expected to cost about £30,000.
But friends and family were quick to share horror stories about the costs of their own weddings. So on Christmas Day Adam, 34, and Jodie, 32, made a drastic decision: to scale back the wedding and prioritise buying a house instead.
Adam, who works in finance, said: “We wanted to start a family and we wanted financial security. We discussed the costs and decided that the money would be better off being spent not just on one day. We would do it a bit cheaper and put the extra money towards a house.”
In January they put down a deposit on a £444,995 three-bedroom new house in Swanscombe. They put in 5 per cent with some help from their families and the developer, Bellway, contributed another 5 per cent in a cashback deal.
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They had moved in by May and were married weeks later at Bexley register office. Their reception for 39 friends and family at a local pub, and other wedding costs, added up to about £7,000.
“Marriage is important to us but we made the right decision,” Adam said. “We wanted a stable home for our children to grow up in, and what we owe will hopefully only go down from now on.”
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Leaving it later
In 1994 some 59.6 per cent of married couples in England and Wales lived together before tying the knot. By 2022, it was 90 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which did not include data for same-sex couples.
The average age for a first marriage went from 27.5 for men and 25.7 for women in 1994 to 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women in 2022.
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The estate agency Savills said that marriage rates among 25 to 34-year-olds fell from 58 per cent in 1991 to 26 per cent in 2021. It looked at the latest Census data for England and Wales.
A poll by the financial services firm OneFamily in February suggested that only 12 per cent of those aged between 18 and 40 would list marriageas one of their top three priorities, whereas 36 per cent said that travelling was in their top three and 28 per cent included buying a house.
Marriage or mortgage
The soaring cost of weddings and property are forcing couples to choose between the two. The average wedding bill was £20,700 last year, according to a survey of 1,808 couples by the wedding website Hitched, up 12.5 per cent on the year before.
That is not far off the amount needed for a 10 per cent deposit on the average £235,851 price of properties bought by first-time buyers in April.
“Marriage used to be a significant trigger point for getting on the housing ladder,” said Lucian Cook from the estate agency Savills. “But as the cost of raising a deposit has risen, more couples have to prioritise between the two.
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“Homeownership has increasingly come first for many, with the age at marriage rising and the number of couples living together before they get married also going up.”
Kirsty Stone from the financial advice firm The Private Office said: “From a purely financial standpoint, there’s no return on the money put towards a wedding, whereas you can easily forecast the benefit of paying down a mortgage.
“You don’t necessarily want to rob people of all the fun and personal milestones in life, especially when we’ve had times during Covid when you’ve had to have virtual weddings. Fundamentally though, most people who have the prospect of owning a home will consider this to be a real priority in life and this may win out over a big wedding.”
Kim Balasubramaniam, a mortgage broker who used to work as a wedding planner, said there had also been a “definite shift from weddings mainly being funded by parents to being funded mainly by the couple, with contributions from parents”.
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‘We put off our wedding while we save for a house’
Amy O’Rourke and Tom Wheater got engaged in January 2022 while they were travelling around southeast Asia. But their big day may not be for a few years yet and they have moved in with his parents in Epping, Essex, so that they can save for a house deposit.
“I do want to get married but it will have to be once we have bought a house and have a mortgage sorted,” said O’Rourke. “Even a small wedding would cost a few thousand pounds so we will have to start saving again for that after we get a property.”
Wheater, 32, and O’Rourke, 30, had been paying £1,700 a month to rent a one-bedroom flat in Earlsfield, southwest London. She said: “You hear so many stories about how tough it is for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder, so doing that and getting somewhere together is a big driver for us.”
The state of the private rental market could be another reason why more young couples are prioritising home ownership. Rents went up a record 6.2 per cent from January 2023 to January this year with average costs now £1,226 a month across Britain and £2,007 in London.
“Most first-time buyers we ask say that they want to buy so they can stop renting,” said Brian Byrnes from the savings app Moneybox. “Many recognise that owning a home is a great way to build your own wealth rather than helping to boost somebody else’s by paying rent.”
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While overall first-time buyer numbers are down this year, they make up a bigger proportion of the market. In the first three months of the year, 25.8 per cent of new mortgages were made to first-time buyers, up from 21.4 per cent in 2022, according to the Bank of England.
But the average price paid by a first-time buyer has risen £43,029 — 22.3 per cent — since April 2019, making it harder to save enough for a deposit. The average first-time buyer is now 32, according to Halifax, up from 30 in 2013. Many of these buyers will already have children or be thinking about starting a family, which could be another reason for wanting to own their own home. In 2020, the average age of first-time mothers was 29, according to the ONS.
Stone said: “Aside from the real concern about wedding debt, it’s all about what is the best idea for your long-term plans. If you want to build a family, then a home is pretty fundamental.”
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‘The cost of living crisis made us rethink’
James and Victoria Moy reconsidered their priorities after their plan for a fancy wedding was scotched during the pandemic. The couple, now 35 and 33, had put down a £1,500 deposit for a reception for 200 guests at Linlithgow Burgh Halls, near Edinburgh, in November 2020.
James, who was a pilot for Flybe, and Victoria, who runs a public relations agency, “wanted to make it a memorable one” and expected to spend at least £10,000 on the day. But then Flybe went into administration in March 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
The couple moved from Edinburgh to be closer to family in Lewes in East Sussex, where James retrained as a firefighter. Then their rent doubled and the cost of living crisis started to bite.
Victoria said: “We thought, we can’t be frivolous any more. It turned everything upside down, we needed a plan and to prioritise things the right way. The big wedding was the first thing to go: we couldn’t afford it.”
The couple married in Lewes register office in November 2021, with two friends as witnesses. They went for brunch at a local restaurant and had a two-day mini honeymoon at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, costing about £3,000 in total.
In December 2022 they used the rest of their savings to put down £20,000 on a two-bedroom flat in Lewes, buying a 50 per cent chunk of the £370,000 property through a shared-ownership scheme.
“I was always taught to think that you have a big wedding and then buy the house,” Victoria said. “But it’s different to when our parents did it. That’s just not what happens now — it’s not realistic.”
