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Wedding season and the costs friends front for each other
There’s a sage green bridesmaid dress hanging in the back of my closet that I’ve worn exactly once, and for a few months it technically belonged to my friend Rachel.
Not literally. But she’d put it on her card, along with the dresses of four other bridesmaids, because the bride wanted us all ordering from the same boutique at the same time so the dye lots would match. I didn’t even know dye lots were a thing until that wedding. Rachel did, because Rachel was the maid of honor, and maid of honor apparently means “unpaid project manager with a credit card.” Five dresses at around $200 each. She was out roughly $1,000 before anyone had even RSVP’d.
That’s how it goes in wedding season. Somebody always ends up fronting money for the group, often a lot of it, often weeks or months before anyone else pays a dime. And because everyone’s busy and a little stressed, the paying-back part tends to get fuzzy.
The usual suspects
The bridesmaid dress is the classic one, but it’s rarely alone. There’s the hotel block, where one person books a handful of rooms to lock in the rate and then has to collect from everybody. And then there’s the bachelorette weekend, which is basically a spring break trip with matching shirts and comes with all the same money headaches I wrote about back in March.
Last year I was in two weddings and went to three more, and I’d guess I was on one end or the other of a fronted cost something like a dozen times. Mostly it worked out fine. But a couple of times it got tense, and almost always for the same reason. Nobody was quite sure what the final number was.
Say the number early
The best thing I’ve seen a maid of honor do was my friend Lauren, in a wedding the summer before. The moment she booked the hotel block, she posted in the bridesmaids’ chat with the per-person share and a screenshot of the confirmation. No rounding, no “roughly.” Just the real number. People paid within a day or two, because there was nothing to figure out and nothing to argue about.
Compare that to the group gift at another wedding, a fancy stand mixer that four of us went in on. My friend Dominic bought it and said he’d “let us know what we owed.” Then life happened, and he never quite got around to telling us. Months went by. I felt weird asking because it seemed like I’d be rushing him, and he felt weird asking because he’d bought it for a wedding and chasing money for a gift felt tacky. So nobody said anything, and for about six months I had this low-grade guilt every time I saw Dominic, like I’d personally stolen a quarter of a stand mixer from him.
Eventually I just texted him myself:
Hey, I realized I never paid you for my part of the stand mixer. What was my share? Want to get it off your plate.
He wrote back almost instantly, relieved, with the number. $87.50. I sent it that night. The whole thing could have been sorted in May instead of November if either of us had just said the number out loud.
Keeping track across a whole season
When you’re in a few weddings in one season, the amounts pile up from different directions. You owe Rachel for a dress, and meanwhile Lauren owes you for the bachelorette Airbnb you booked. It’s genuinely hard to keep in your head, and I think this is where a lot of the awkwardness comes from. It’s not that anyone’s being shady. It’s that the numbers live in six different group chats.
What helps, I think, is having one place where all of it lives. Some people keep a spreadsheet for wedding season, which I respect enormously. A running balance per person does the job too, whether that’s a note on your phone or something like OweMate, which keeps a separate balance for each friend and marks it settled once it hits zero. The main thing is that when someone asks “wait, do I still owe you for the dress?” you can actually answer.
I also try to decide, privately, what I’m happy to just absorb. I’m not asking anyone to pay me back for a $6 coffee the morning of a wedding. Weddings are expensive enough without everyone itemizing the small stuff, and letting a few things go keeps the whole season feeling more like a celebration than a group project.
Rachel did get paid back for every dress, eventually. At the reception she gave a toast that was funny and sweet, and somewhere in the middle she thanked the bridesmaids “for finally Venmoing me.” The bride laughed harder than anyone.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.