It would be a great idea if you could buy insurance against divorce — something with a higher deductible for marriages that didn’t last long, or rates that adjusted up or down as your children grew up. Teenagers add more stress to a household, so the rates would be higher to cover the increased risk of splitting up. Rates and deductibles could also be different for couples that choose divorce mediation over litigation.
We aren’t serious, of course, because we know that a marriage is not a thing. You can’t really attach a cash value to a marriage the way you would to a car or a house. But you can attach a cash value to a wedding, and insurance companies are there to absorb some of the risk.
According to the wedding insurance professionals at one of the country’s largest insurance companies, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with a wedding. With the average wedding costing a couple upwards of $25,000 these days, more and more brides and grooms are protecting their investments with insurance policies.
For anyone who has ever had anything to do with planning a wedding, an analysis of the insurer’s 2011 wedding policy claims did not reveal anything new. The two big-ticket items, venues and vendors, accounted for 31 percent of all claims. Of those, the most common problems were facilities and vendors going out of business after the couple has put down the frequently sizeable deposit and often after all other locations and caterers have been booked.
The problems don’t stop there, though. We’ll continue this in our next post.
Source: Insurance Journal, “Top reasons happy couples file wedding insurance claims,” April 2, 2012
