Banks & Wedding Registries - A Marriage Made in Heaven?
August 22, 2007 at 10:57 pm by Ehab BandarI recently got married overseas, in Lebanon to be exact. We had another reception in California. For the Lebanon wedding, we setup a wedding registry with a local bank in Beirut (Bank Audi), which nearly every couple does by default. Here’s how it works:
You setup a shared bank account for you and your spouse for a limited time, used exclusively to receive gifts. Invitees who want to give a gift need only the bank’s Swift code (equivalent to US routing number) and account number, after which they can transfer or deposit the money directly into the wedding bank account. And then by going to the branch or online, the couple can get a printout of all the gifts and who made them. The couple can use the funds immediately to payoff expenses or purchase what they really need. They do this by either withdrawing the funds, wiring them to their personal account, or using the debit card associated with the account. You can’t believe the convenience and practicality of setting this up. In return, Bank Audi charges a nominal fee, plus a viral marketing way to get a lot more people to use their bank to make the gift, and potentially open a new account or add another product for existing customers.
Compare that to our California reception experience. We setup two wedding registries, one at Macy’s and the other at Amazon. At Macy’s, we met with a Wedding Registry Consultant (I’m serious) who provided us with all the details of setting it up, the terms and agreements, return policy, and any discounts. It was not quite like getting a mortgage, but close. Then we proceeded to browse, search, and select the gifts we thought we needed, but which we might never need. We struggled to find the perfect gift, and ended up often taking stabs at what we thought we liked, but which we might never use. The time it took to do all that was exponentially more than it took to set up the bank registry.
Now you can argue that money is not the same as a real gift, but then again, it’s a gift that the recepient selected, which defeats the purpose of a gift. In essence, the giver was simply the personal shopper of the receiver. The additional cost to get the gift to you could have been spent in countless other ways.
Setting up a bank account makes a lot of sense, especially for a young couple where money is more important than material things or if you’re having an overseas wedding, like we had. Unlike a bank account, the giver’s gift goes directly into a fund, unburdened by additional costs such as shipping and handling, gift wrapping, and the potential cost of returns, exchanges or duplicate gifts. A wedding bank registry, although seemingly unromantic, helped us greatly offset the wedding costs and saved us tons of trouble. It also helped save a little bit of the environment by not using up packing material, which by the end could have filled an entire 2-car garage. It’s the equivalent of the red envelop, but in this case, no need to worry about where the gifts are at any given point in time.
The surprising thing is why gift registries are so popular, other than they’re a goldmine for the companies doing them and the marketing dollars behind them. One reason is that they’re perceived as more thoughtful or practical. Another is that the presentation of a gift in a gift box is usually preferable compared to seeing a dollar amount in your account or a gift check. But as we just mentioned, purchasing gifts that the happy couple already selected is far from thoughtful or practical. As we’ve seen, it’s downright wasteful in terms of time, energy, money and the environment.
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