Woman asks sister for $20K for her wedding after calling her's 'trashy.' AITA?
Unfortunately, weddings can sometimes feel like a competition.
Everyone wants to have the perfect day and it is hard not to compare your wedding to other people's. It's also hard to not feel insulted when someone you love has criticisms about your special day. Two sisters were both given $25,000 from their parents to put towards their wedding. One sister got married first and decided to have a conservative, small wedding, saving a majority of the funds. Now, her sister is getting married in a much more grandiose manner. She can't afford it and says her sister should give her the money she needs. All of this after trash talking her sisters minimalist wedding.
AITA for not helping my sister pay for her wedding even though I could easily afford it just because of a petty reason?
I (33F) have a younger sister Jamie (31F) who got engaged to her fiancé a few months ago and now she’s deep into wedding planning. Our parents gifted us $25,000 each as a wedding present when we got engaged to help with wedding expenses and just help us get started with some savings.
For background: I got married 2 years ago to my husband and we practically had little to no expenses. We just did a small wedding ceremony/celebration in my parents backyard and I used my moms old dress so our only expenses were really just food and photography. Due to this, we saved $20,000 of the money we were gifted and just put it into savings.
Although my husband and I were happy with our day, Jamie had a lot to say. She practically spent every single family event after the wedding gossiping about how my wedding was so “trashy and cheap”.
I think she expected a lot more from me because I work as a software engineer and my husband is a surgeon, and we could have afforded to have a much nicer wedding.
Now it’s time for her wedding and she has plans to go all out for it for it, which I wouldn’t care about if she could afford it, but instead she has become a greedy bridezilla asking anyone and everyone for cash.
My parents refused to give more that the original $25k and other family members have chipped in, but maybe $5k max combined. Unfortunately, my sister knows I saved the $20k from my parents and that my husband and I have a good amount of money saved up because of our salaries.
She has been asking me nonstop to give her the $20k as a wedding gift or help pay for another one of her events like the bridal shower, bachelorette, rehearsal dinner, or honeymoon.
Her reasoning is that my husband and I could easily afford to gift her one of these things and I even gifted my cousin a honeymoon vacation as a wedding gift last year so why couldn’t I do something similar for my only sibling when I did that for a cousin.
She’s right in the sense that I could easily afford to pay for parts of her wedding, but in all honestly I don’t want to give her anything after she treated me so poorly following my own wedding.
I told her my reasoning and that I don’t want to (financially) support someone who didn’t support me on my big day and now she has been going around telling family that I’m extremely selfish and immature for this.
Apparently she has already put down deposits on a lot of services and vendors for her plans and just expected me to help pay for it, but now she has no way of paying the vendors and she can’t get her deposits back either.
So now my family wants me to help her out so she doesn’t lose the little money she already has. I just don’t see how this is my problem. AITA?
Here are the top comments from readers:
NTA. She got a sum of money for it and if she can’t stay within that budget NOBODY else needs to pay her a penny. You don’t owe her even five cents. You were smart to have a low budget wedding and have money for other things after. Smart smart smart. She was rude rude rude.
NTA. Why do people plan events that are outside their budget and then expect others to make up the difference? $25k is a lot of money if spent wisely. It seems she banked on having the $20k you saved from the outset. No, just plain no.
NTA. That's not a petty reason at all. Your sister doesn't deserve one cent of your money. And it's not 'trashy and cheap' to have a small, backyard wedding. It's called 'smart' and 'practical.' And you now have $20,000 put aside for your own needs, your own expenses, to be spent as you see fit.
$30k in free money wasn’t enough, so she put down deposits on stuff she can’t afford, banking on you feeling bad about the hole she dug and giving her another $20k in free money? Wow, NTA.
I bet $20 grand that she’s going to have to cancel all the vendors that she can’t afford to pay and then elope with her fiancé. Then she’s going to get hurt and offended if anyone calls her wedding cheap and trashy.
She’ll try to spin it as a grand romantic gesture of love between her and her fiancé. Just saying this because this exact same scenario happened to a coworker of mine. NTA.