Have you planned your child's destination wedding yet?

The Tuscan wedding of Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli to actress Anushka Sharma was an event of dreams. If the destination wedding has got you all excited, then this is a good place to find out how you too can get there.

Destination weddings have got most of the couples forgo the cliché rituals of getting married in the bride’s home town; they rather choose to exchange their vows on a tropical sun drenched beach. While it all sounds too dreamy, a destination wedding still needs to be planned, just as any other wedding.

Deciding the destination is the easier part, what follows is a challenge that requires ample planning for the wedding and also the finances to fund the destination wedding. Let’s read a story of two lovers.

Tale of two lovers

Samrat and Malishka are college sweethearts known among friends as Samishka. Having settled down well in their respective careers, they plan to tie the knot in a few years. Like many other couples, they want to get hitched in a romantic locale, one that won’t be a financial setback for their parents. Thus, Samishka approached a wedding planner to understand how they can orchestrate a successful budget wedding.

Tales from a wedding planner

Brand Baja Baraat (BBB), a local wedding planner, was the reference Samishka got from common friends. BBB suggested two popular locations – Udaipur and Goa. Going by BBB’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, Samishka’s wedding should cost anywhere between INR 15 and 20 lakhs for hosting around 150 guests for the wedding ceremony and reception dinner, i.e. Rs 10,000 per guest. For couples with deeper pockets, the destination wedding can get more intricate both arrangement-wise & money-wise.

Samishka could opt for additional components like:

1. Stay / accommodation for the guests
2. Transportation to the city (say Goa) and to the venue
3. Music and entertainment

Needless to say, opting for all of these would pole vault Samishka’s destination wedding to a lavish destination wedding.

The Plan before the plan

Since Samrat and Malishka just started their career, they do not have enough funds to finance their wedding. Here is where their parents step in.

Like many other parents, Samiksha’s parents also had a goal in mind – to have a corpus for their children’s wedding. They started investing early as they had two major goals in life – their children’s wedding and their retirement corpus. And it was important that their retirement kitty was treated as sacred and off-limits for the destination wedding. Investing for their children’s wedding simultaneously with their retirement plan ensured that both their life goals are fulfilled. Investing in ULIPs helped them create a corpus to sustain their current lifestyle in their sunset years as well as plan for their child’s destination wedding.

By saving systematically for a goal, and in investments like ULIPs, Samishka’s parents gave themselves a better chance of realizing their goals.