01 April 2005
With two royal weddings set for next week – Prince Charles and the King of Soap, Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow are both to wed for the second time on April 8th – Alliance & Leicester has revealed just how much the cost of a wedding has increased.
In an uncanny parallel, both Charles and Ken married for the first time in 1981, when the average wedding cost £1,737; but in 2005, the average cost has shot up by 760 per cent to almost £15,000, the building society asserts.
It’s not surprising that one in five happy couples look to borrow money to finance their big day – with a quarter of those choosing a personal loan.
Alliance & Leicester warns loan-borrowers that they could be losing money by heading straight for a Big Four bank, however.
Whether it is due to lack of time or the assumption that the Big Four high street banks give the best value, the Kens and Deirdres of this world could be losing out by over £1,700 by not shopping around for a good value personal loan,” said Ash Mukadam, personal loans manager for Alliance & Leicester.
“By heading straight for their high street bank couples could be wasting £1,700 – which they might as well cut up and use as confetti!”
According to the building society’s research, Londoners borrowed the most for their weddings, taking out an average of £8,563 compared with the national average of £8,052.