Focus
Financial diary of a groom
By An Dun (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-23 07:45
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Many young people in Beijing will not get marriedbefore they havea house, a car, a diamond ringand a proper wedding ceremony. [Photos by Wang Jing / Xiao Liang / Cheng Gong] |
Jiang Chen (not his real name), a 26-year-old public servant, got married on April 10. It took him two and half years to prepare. The couple and their parents spent a total of 1.2 million yuan on starting a new life together, including the wedding and honeymoon trip, and buying a home, furniture and a car.
The wedding dress was the first expense. The pragmatic bride-to-be initially planned to rent a gown. But when she cheerfully tried on the rented dress at home, her mother went to the kitchen without so much as a glance at the dress and refused to come back to see how it fit.
The bride-to-be spent a long time online that evening and found a nice, brand new wedding dress for a reasonable price - 1,000 yuan. She didn't tell her mother she bought it online and said it cost 5,000 yuan, which satisfied her mother.
Jiang's already-married friends gave him some tips, which helped the young couple save a good deal of money on wedding cars. Jiang hired a driver from Tianjin with a red Mercedes convertible. The car was decent enough and the price was cheaper than those of drivers from Beijing. The following motorcade needed to all be red Mazdas, since Jiang's parents-in-law gave the couple money to buy a Mazda as a gift. They found drivers with the right cars and free time on the wedding day through a Mazda club online and paid several hundred yuan to each driver for their services.
The wedding reception cost a fortune. They spent 150 yuan for each person and had about 80 guests. The total gift-money they received was less than 20,000 yuan, so not much of it was left after deducting the lunch expenses. The bride recorded everyone's contribution and told Jiang: "We need to give the money back when they have something to celebrate."
Here are Jiang's own words about how he got a home, car and diamond ring for his wife:
Home
Buying and decorating a house has been the biggest task for me during the past two years. Many people said my father was silly to buy a house at that time.
"It is not the first time I have been silly. To marry a girl, to have a son, to help get a wife for the son - I have been silly for my whole life," said my father.
My father says I am totally dependent on him and my mother, which is true. I don't want to depend on them, but I cannot afford a house by myself. If I had not bought a house, I could not have gotten married. Many women have "owning a home" as their top requirement for prospective husbands.
You may have to live on the far outskirts of Beijing and you may have to struggle to pay the mortgage for a long time, but you must own a home.
I am lucky that my parents bought me a two-bedroom apartment in Daxing district. My father paid the full price and the property rights belong to me.
"Your apartment and your wedding have cost me all my savings. I am done buying things for you - do not come to me again for money," my father said. "If you cannot afford a kid, do not have one, keeping in mind that you will probably need to buy a house for your child when you are old."
I kept silent when my father told me this. What could I say? With a 3,450 yuan monthly salary, I cannot even afford a doghouse in Beijing.
I used to tell my parents I would just remain single so they wouldn't need to spend any money helping me, but my father said I was his only son and that he would do whatever he could for me.
"Your mother and I will be happy if you are settled," he said.
I had a little savings, just enough to decorate my apartment in a simple style. The furniture was from Ikea and my wife bought appliances online or at outdoor markets. But it is nice to have our own apartment and the price of my home has doubled in only two years.
Car
These days if the groom's family contributes a house, the bride's family often contributes at least a car to the marriage. The affordable homes are usually far from the city center and it usually takes more than three hours to commute, often longer if there's a traffic jam, which there frequently is in Beijing.
I never expected a fancy car such as a BMW or a Volvo from my wife's family. If I had found a wife from a family able to buy such cars I wouldn't have needed to use my parents' money to buy a home. So I was somewhat surprised when my wife's family gave us money to buy a nice Mazda.
I feel I cannot demand too much from my wife or her family. She has had a stepfather since she was young. Her mother lost her job a long time ago and has always felt that she is indebted to her current husband. Fortunately the stepfather is a kind man.
But I cannot ask for more. I've already got their daughter as my wife. Her mother doesn't earn much and, by tradition, her stepfather shouldn't have felt any obligation to help us financially when we got married.
I told my wife not to ask for anything from her family for our marriage. She agreed and asked me to do the same with my family. A car is only a means of transportation and doesn't need to be expensive, I told her.
But my wife's mother gave us 200,000 yuan to buy a car. I felt quite touched when I learned her stepfather contributed to the amount. My mother-in-law talked to him about this "big thing of marriage", saying things aren't falling into place financially. The stepfather was a bit upset when he heard my mother-in-law's plan to use her own savings, so in the end the 200,000 yuan came from my mother-in-law's own savings and my mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law's joint savings.
So we had a car for our marriage, although my mother-in-law said she wouldn't pay for any other extra expenses that come with the car.
Diamond ring
My fiance once asked me to watch the movie Lust, Caution, but going to the cinema costs at least 300 yuan, so I convinced her that we should just stay home and watch the DVD. She rewound and rewatched the part where the hero purchases a big diamond ring for the heroine.
I promised her I would buy one for her. I said I couldn't afford a ring like the one in the movie since I'm only at the lower end of the working class.
But eventually I went shopping with her for a diamond ring. We spent 6,000 yuan on a discounted white gold ring decorated with little diamonds. She was satisfied, almost too easily. So I felt a little guilty and told her to ask her mother whether the ring was suitable.
Her mother's advice was sincere, but bad for me. She suggested replacing the small diamonds with a big one-carat one, something more valuable for investment. My wife was going to spend 40,000 yuan of her savings on it. But I would have been ashamed to let my wife buy her own diamond ring.
So we chose a cheaper type of diamond with the simplest design and I borrowed 50,000 yuan from my parent to pay for it. My wife is a really good woman. After I bought her the ring, she insisted she would pay to decorate our house. I initially didn't want to let her, but I spent a little of her money in the end. I cannot ask for more from my parents, her family or from her.
For China Daily
