02.14.25 Valentines Edition: Couples And Money / Wedding Costs

Happy Valentine’s Day! One way to help keep love alive is being honest about money matters and talking over financial goals with your partner. Clark talks about different ways couples can navigate finances successfully. Also, the average cost of a wedding has hit a new high! But there are other ways to think about the big day, and beyond. Financial Fidelity: Segment 1 Ask Clark: Segment 2 Wedding Expense: Segment 3 Ask Clark: Segment 4 Mentioned on the show: Clark Howard's 5 Money Tips for Couples How Couples Can Get on the Same Page About Money 6 Things To Know Before Contacting the National Foundation for Credit Counseling How To Spot and Avoid Gift Card Scams The One and Only Exception to Clark Howard's 'No Gift Card' Rule How To Talk to Your Partner About Money Before Marriage SAVE Money On Your Wedding Marriage, money and happiness: A timeline I Need Plane Tickets for an International Trip. Should I Buy Now or Wait? 5 Steps To Getting a Good Deal on a Hotel Room Clark.com resources Episode transcripts Community. Clark.com / Ask Clark Clark.com daily money newsletter Consumer Action Center Free Helpline: 636-492-5275 Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 0:42Speaker 02

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• 0:50Speaker 03

  It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Valentine Day edition of The Clark Howard Show.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  I forgot my red shirt, I'm so bummed, but your red looks fantastic.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Thank you. I never wear anything but our standard issue podcast shirt for our YouTube show. Those of you who watch us on YouTube, you see I'm in this bright red shirt. It was only $6 for this shirt at Walmart.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Our mission is to empower you with advice and information that helps you make better financial decisions in your life on this Valentine's Day.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  And in your love life.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yes. So we only do Clark Stinks now every other week, so I don't get to do something I love today and hearing how I can improve myself, but it'll be back next Friday. But I do get to talk about things affecting us as couples. First, talking to your partner about money and avoiding, well, it's just a phrase now, financial infidelity. And later, if you're gonna tie the knot, wow, the average cost of a wedding in 25 blows my mind. But anyway, we're gonna first talk about people that are coupled up, whatever the

• 2:13Speaker 03

  arrangement is, and...

• 2:17Speaker 03

  People keep a lot of financial secrets from the one they love. Every relationship has its own dynamics. But I will tell you, I know it's true, from over the years on TV, talking with couples that are having money trouble, that that money trouble by itself may or may not heavily hurt the relationship. But when one of the people in a couple finds out that the other has been hiding expenses or hiding money, you want to blow apart trust in a relationship, you will blow apart trust in the relationship.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Please, don't hide things from your partner, or whatever your relationship is, if you're living as a couple. Now, there are couples that are married, or living together, whatever, who have an understanding with the person they're married to, and you, as long as everybody's on the same page about this, this is fine. And what would an understanding be? That you have your money, they've got their money, and then there's the house account, where there's a sharing of common expenses in the house. You do your own retirement account, they do their own retirement account, you do your

• 3:45Speaker 03

  own savings account, they do their own, but the house account should have a savings component built into it. It's all about being prepared for that rainy day, because if each of you are responsible for your own savings, and one of you's not as good as the other at it, and then a big expense comes, and only one of you has the money for it, woo, that's going to be a problem. If your arrangement is that you're sharing those common expenses, there should be an amount that's deposited into that joint account, and then you got the rest of your money, you do what with? And part of what goes in every month in that joint account should be money for those oops that happen in life.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  But keeping it a secret about you did this, you did that, the secret purchases, the secret debt, whatever. Big mistake, big mistake. I don't want you doing that. And a lot of couples don't like talking about money. I don't want you obsessed with money. Is that what I'm saying? But it's really good for a couple to have conversations even before you get married or might move in together or whatever. It's really important to have conversations. What are your goals? What do you hope to do someday? When do you want to retire? Where do you want to live? How are you going to pay for that?

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Having conversations about money when you're not sore at each other is really helpful for that relationship. You don't want money to undermine the love that you have for each other. Period. Happy Valentine's Day.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  All right, let's go to Jim in Florida. Well, Clark, I've gotten myself into a bit of a financial pickle. I will turn 50 on Valentine's Day. Happy birthday, Jim.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Happy birthday today, Jim.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  And have been raising my two daughters by myself the last eight years. It has been an emotional and financial struggle, but rewarding. I have worked in the heavy equipment industry, starting when I took custody of my daughters, and have worked my way up from the warehouse to a sales job with a guaranteed salary of 75K for the first year.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Congratulations to you.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Yep, then I moved to commission, which should place me in six figures. Before this gig, I've made a handful of horrible financial decisions. I'm behind on everything except my rent and have quite a few things in collections. How do I clean these messes up? I don't want to live in an apartment for the rest of my life.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  So Jim, you've got to sit down. First of all, you're already doing so much. You're a single parent, raising two daughters, you're working your tail off, and cut yourself some slack. But you have goals you want moving forward. And you're 50 and you're really assessing those goals and where you are with your life and all that. I want you to sit down with a credit counselor. It can be either virtually or in person. Go over your whole situation and get their advice. This costs little or nothing if you go to a legitimate credit counselor. And the way you find legitimate credit counselors, go to the website,

• 7:03Speaker 03

  National Foundation for Credit Counseling, which is NFCC.org. Make that appointment and talk through your situation. They'll have you fill out a bunch of paperwork that you'll have right there staring in front of you. Yo, this, yo, this, yo, this, yo, this. This is what income you have. This is what monthlies you've got. And it'll really help you with them talking it through with you. They may even be able to work out a payment plan for you with the people you owe money, that's something that you can handle in your budget. The goal is clear. You want to not be a nomad in your life. You want to provide more stability for your daughters. You want to own your own home.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  So you have extra incentive to work on getting the debts settled, handled, and moving forward. And I know you're going through a lot, but you're there for your daughters. And let me tell you, you're making a big difference by doing that.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Scott in Ohio says, I know Clark hates physical gift cards and prefers if one goes the gift card route to do it electronically. But I haven't seen this issue with Costco mentioned previously. And there's a link to a Reddit thread about people going to use their Costco e-gift cards for the first time, only to find out that are they mostly or completely drained? I saw this around Christmas when I was looking into possibly getting the Southwest gift card on sale down to $420. But reading this post, as well as seeing dozens of people have this issue, led me to hold off on the purchase as potentially losing over $400 isn't some chunk change. Of course, Southwest gift cards are no longer being offered at Costco for the time being. But what are Clark and team's thoughts on this? Could a third-party vendor who issues these have a bad actor on the inside?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Could crooks have hacked the system? Is getting one from Costco at the store still the only exception of the in-person gift cards rule? And the only way one should get a gift card from them? Thanks for all you do.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  So, you know, I've long worried about...

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Gift cards in every possible formation, but I've felt much more comfortable about the e-gift cards because they don't actually exist till they're created. It would require some form of hack, as you suppose, inside a company or someone who is hacked into your computer to get to them. The physical gift cards have so many dangers to them. Now, let's take one that you buy, the Costco shop cards. The Costco individual is the shop cards are held at the register. They're not available like the ones that have been so vulnerable that are on unprotected

• 9:51Speaker 03

  gift card racks. And those, they don't come live until activated at the register. I can't tell from what you're talking about on Reddit if it's the Southwest gift cards that are being compromised or the shop cards.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Apparently, those are just the online purchases, the e-gift cards.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  The e-gift cards. And so I would say that gift cards by their very nature are of such risk. I have held my breath. And when the Southwest gift cards, since I fly Southwest every month, since the Southwest gift cards, when they've been sold by Sam's and Costco, have such an enormous benefit, you know, paying basically 85 cents of each dollar of what a ticket would actually cost. I have held my breath. I bought them and I've been hoping as hope that nobody cracks the code and steals the money. So far, over the last four years, I guess I've been buying them, I've not had a problem.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  But it could always happen and then I'm going to feel like an idiot. So the gift card process, nobody has been able to make the gift card system.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Completely secure, which is why I don't like gift cards. And the only time I say to buy them is if you value the discount you're getting that you know you're getting versus the risk you're having that the money may vanish for your eyes. The time never, ever, not ever to buy a gift card is when you're taking real money and all you're getting is basically an IOU for the same value of money. You're taking good money and turning it into inferior money. And I'm going to do more reading here and see if there's something here that I need to put out a consumer alert about that makes my prior recommendation of e-gift cards no longer a safe harbor.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Fred in Minnesota says, maybe this is the ultimate cheapskate type of question. I bought a two-pack of Clorox toilet bowl cleaning bleach. The two bottles came bound together with shrink plastic wrap. When I removed the wrapper, I noticed there was a leak at the neck of one of the bottles and the removal of the wrap caused it to spew all over, getting on my sweatshirt and my favorite jeans. When something like this happens, do I, as a consumer, have any recourse? Can I write the company and ask for them to buy me a new pair of jeans? Or is it all a part of the built-in risk we take when buying things like bleach? Devoted listener who appreciates Wes but misses a daily dose of Clark.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Wes, for those of you who aren't familiar from our YouTube show and our podcast, is our Ask Our Advisor that does one podcast a week that's available to you that airs on Tuesdays.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  On Tuesdays. He's a fiduciary, fee-only advisor.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Fiduciary, fee-only financial planner advisor. And so there are so many extremely sophisticated investing questions we get that really should be answered by a fiduciary, fee-only advisor. And so that's why we do that podcast once a week. And I'm glad you're enjoying Wes. All right, so you may or may not have heard my story that I bought from Sam's Club Members Mark liquid soap containers, the big bulk ones. They had a leak in the bottom of one of the bottles and made a mess, a mess.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  And Sam's replaced them, but I didn't even think to ask about the cleanup I had to do. And it cost me some money to clean up that mess because it had a split in the seam on the bottom of one of the bottles. If I was going to ask for it, it wouldn't be from Clorox. It would be from the store you bought the item. The retailers generally are more powerful than the manufacturers at this point. You were a customer of the retailer, not a customer of Clorox. And I think in a case like this, it seems like it would make sense, something probably happened in handling, may have fallen off a forklift, who knows, to seek compensation

• 14:12Speaker 03

  from the retailer for the damage to your jeans. I think that plus a replacement of the product is a reasonable request. They'll probably devalue what they'll pay you for the jeans based on the age of them, but it's too bad it's not in right now to have completely discolored jeans. Remember when that was in and you'd have all kinds of like white patches?

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Oh, yes. Bleached and ripped. I remember in the eighties, my dad getting so angry with me because he bought me a new pair of jeans and I ripped them up and put puffy paint on them and bleached them. He was like, what on earth are you doing?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  So that's the only thing you could do is you could wait till that became the vintage in thing to do again, to have that whitened out bleached spot on your jeans.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Darn it. Yeah. Or dye them black, maybe.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  But that's, that stinks. Your favorite jeans.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  It does. Coming up ahead, here's something that stinks. The average cost of a wedding has gone up, up and away. We're going to talk about that up ahead and my feelings about having a blowout wedding.

• 15:20Speaker 00

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• 15:50Speaker 01

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• 17:35Speaker 03

  So, average cost of a wedding, $36,000. And it varies by region of the country. I think the most expensive weddings in the country are in New York metro area, the tri-state area. But Zola, which is one of those wedding planning sites, their survey says rounded off, expect 36 grand for the typical wedding around the country. And I'm going to repeat something for you from several years ago that I've alluded to a couple of times since. When my daughter and her now husband were getting married, I sat down with them and said, "Okay, I've got this amount of money

• 18:18Speaker 03

  that I was going to give you for your wedding instead of just paying for your wedding. And then you're free to do with it whatever you want. You want to go to the justice of the peace and get married for $25 and have all the rest of the money for your new life together? Do that. You want to spend all the money plus more on your wedding? Up to this amount is yours. Beyond it, well, that's out of your pocket." I did this because if you're a parent paying for a kid's wedding, going into a wedding, it seems like the most important thing is the wedding, the wedding, the wedding, the wedding. And it's an old wives' tale that I think is true,

• 19:00Speaker 03

  that the success of a marriage is inversely proportional to how much money you spend on the wedding. And so remembering that is the commencement of what you hope is a long and happy union together. It is not the end of things. It is the beginning of those great expectations. So, spending tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding, what's the point? I mean, what you want is you want to have something where your family and friends are together, if that's what you want to do. And it doesn't have to be really fancy. I've been to every kind of wedding there ever has been. I've been to weddings that they spent clearly hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  And I've been to weddings that cost like nothing in someone's backyard and everything in between. So, think about it. What's the goal? Is it to have a down payment on a house? Is it, would it be better to go into a marriage without personal debts? And if you have a parent who gives you a sum of money, you do the wedding as cheap as you can, and then you go into your marriage debt-free, or as close to it as you can? And my daughter, in son-in-law's case, they did a wedding that was very nice, but very modest in cost. And they did take the difference and use it towards a down payment on a house.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  And you gotta do what's right for you. If everything's about having this giant fancy wedding, fine, if you can afford it. But go into debt for that? No way, not any day. Krista?

• 20:44Speaker 04

  This first question's from Kevin in Georgia. Hi, Clark, longtime listener, first time quote-unquote caller. My wife and I are planning our 20-year anniversary trip. Congratulations for the end of September. We were thinking of going to Oktoberfest in Munich. I was told to fly into Amsterdam, then train our way over. Any advice would be amazing. What's the best time to buy, fly into and out of hotel in Munich that would not cost as much as a car? Thank you so much. You're the best.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. In 20 years, congratulations. And you're so smart to do your anniversary trip in the fall. Don't know if you were married in September, but this is smart, because you're moved past the peak season. You're in what's called shoulder. The airfares will be a whole lot cheaper. The shoulder fare sales aren't going to start popping up for about another month. And the shoulder fare seasons cover April, May, September, October, most years. The fares in September, October to Europe, you're from Georgia in

• 21:50Speaker 03

  the southeast US, the fares should be somewhere around 550 round trip. If Atlanta is your normal airport, though, Atlanta is one of the most expensive cities in the United States to fly internationally because of dominance by Delta Airlines. So...

• 22:13Speaker 03

  The best deals are going to be actually flying up to New York potentially. Spend a night there, do some sightseeing, make it part of your 20th anniversary trip. And then fly from New York to Europe and it'll be less than the 550 likely in the shoulder season airfare sales. And go into Europe wherever the great deal is, wherever you are in Europe is all going to be fun. And then work your way over to Munich by car, by train, even by discount flight if you're way to the west in Europe and go over to Munich.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  No fooling hotel rates during Oktoberfest, they are very, very high. Book a refundable room for your hotel stay in Munich as you work out your itinerary. Because way ahead of time for Oktoberfest, the hotel rates tend to be marked as high as they think anybody will ever pay. And then this is why you book a refundable hotel room, because you reshop it repeatedly once a month, leading up to your Oktoberfest stay. And again, congratulations, have an absolutely great time. You could do the Amsterdam thing, but no, it's wherever in Europe the best deal pops

• 23:40Speaker 03

  up for shoulder season fairs.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Amy in Oregon says, "My 18-year-old son would like to plan a trip with his friends this upcoming summer and he's thinking about Mexico. There will be 10 to 15 boys traveling together. They would like to stay in a resort. They don't have much money. Is Mexico a safe option or any other ideas for a group of kids who are not yet 21?" We're both laughing because we both have 19-year-old sons.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. Okay, so.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Gosh, statute of limitations has run out on this. My son was 18 his senior year in high school. And they were having an unsanctioned unofficial trip that we had some parental units on as loose. What do you call that?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Chaperones.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  And they can party, they can drink, they can be crazy. You really got to think about your son's maturity at 18. If you let them just all go together without any adults along at all.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  I too attended such a trip.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we were, we were at a resort south of Cancun. You were on one.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Jamaica.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Jamaica. And where we were standing with my son one night when he was throwing up after drinking. Yeah, so the kids can be as wild as they can be and some of them will be somewhat responsible. Some will not be. And Mexico, safe, not safe. Mexico has a safety problem. I'm not telling you anything that's not been in the news. The boys will need to stay in a hermetically sealed resort. We were in one of those. The security was crazy. First, you went through a military checkpoint, or they appeared to be, they were in military type uniforms. It may have been some kind of police.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Then at the resort, there was what looked like a 15 foot high fence, like you were going to a rich people's prison. And then there was a double security gate into the resort. We were completely sealed in there.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Boats going out on the, in the water where there's security boats.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  There were police boats or coast guard type boats going back and forth on the beach. There was never any danger in any of the boys on that trip. There were boys and girls on that one. I just really want you to think through having 18-year-olds on a completely unsupervised trip. I don't advise it, but if parents are there and they're paying attention, I think it's okay.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  And other options would be maybe the Dominican Republic or Jamaica, same thing, sealed resort. Although, we were in a resort, a nice resort in Jamaica, and one of the girls was roofied by someone that came in, like a taxi driver that one of the inside employees knew. And they caught it, thank goodness. Nothing happened to her, but it was, you know, scary. Joan in Illinois-

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Well, we're really selling it, aren't we?

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Joan in Illinois says, "I have a question of being overcharged on sales tax, which happened to me twice recently. Once for a cellphone-

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Think about this. This is the second question we've had about it in six weeks.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  True. Once for a cellphone purchased from a cellphone service provider, and once for a pottery mug, both from national chains. The amount of tax on the phone should have been $10.25 for a $99.99 phone, but I was charged $64.57, which the cellphone company claimed was based on the pre-sale retail price of the phone. The overcharge for the mug is much smaller, but still troubles me. My questions are as follows. Can a business charge you sales tax on an amount that is more than you're paying for the item itself, e.g. tax on the pre-sale price or ad tax for shipping costs? And what agencies should a person complain to if you encounter something like this? After I successfully disputed the cellphone tax with American Express, the cellphone company cut off my cellphone

• 27:44Speaker 04

  service, and I was only able to restore it by repaying them the excess tax. They contacted me out of the blue 17 days later and apologized on the overcharge and credited the amount to my cellphone bill, but this was after I had lodged a complaint with my state's tax fraud division, so I'm guessing the refund was likely connected to my complaint. Going forward, I will be scrutinizing bills to verify the sales taxes correct, but I'd like to know what government agencies should be alerted to this behavior."

• 28:12Speaker 03

  So I talked about the other side of this coin when this came up six weeks ago. There are state sales taxing authorities-

• 28:22Speaker 03

  That hold that if, let's say with a cellphone. The cellphone carrier did not buy the cellphone from the manufacturer of that phone for $99. They paid a much higher wholesale price. The retail price is much higher regularly than what they did it to you for $99. Those $99 deals are usually tied to you remaining with the carrier for some period of time. So in some states, the sales tax authorities hold that the tax is supposed to be charged on the actual real value of that phone, not the fake price put on.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  We learned about this 20 something years ago when there was a big thing in the country where you could get a desktop computer and monitor for free in return for signing up for a dial-up internet service provider, which is something if you're too young to know what that is, thank goodness you don't know what that was. But anyway, we would get complaints that people were being charged sales tax on this crazy price on a computer they were getting for free. And the number of states were calculating the sales tax based on the retail value. In your state, Illinois, maybe they don't calculate that way.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And that's why the cellphone company later said, oops, here's your money back. You're right, we were wrong. And it's hard for them to know what the sales tax procedure is in all 50 states. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, they were just incompetent. But that's what's going on. And you're so smart to stand up for yourself. But in a number of states, you actually do have to pay the higher sales tax based on the real value of the phone or a similar item.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  I want to thank you so much for joining us. I hope that your Valentine's Day is wonderful and that your weekend is outstanding. I don't know what to do with myself on this first weekend with no football, but I will figure out how to survive that and have a great one and know that we're here serving you all weekend long at Clark.com and Clarkdeals.com and know what we're all about today and every other day of the year, empowering you so you save more, spend less, and avoid getting ripped off.

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