We’ve talked about dedicating wedding registries to everything from student debt to honeymoons, but if you still remain undecided about what to do with yours, it may involve these possibilities: 1. Faced with all of the options, you cannot decide which one is best (or you need most). Or 2. perhaps none of the suggestions apply because you’re at a point in your life where you really don’t want or need for anything. For either case, here’s our final suggestions. One of the them involves using your registry as a means to bettering the lives of others, and the other is meant to give you the freedom to put your registry towards any combination of wants and needs you desire –even if it’s understandably controversial.
Charity Registry
We’ve talked a lot about using the registry as a responsible means to shore up personal financial struggles, but what if your wants and needs are already accounted for? For some couples, a registry is a chance to help those less fortunate –or even assist those knee-deep in struggles that they’ve battled with themselves. you can contact a charity you wish to support and see if you can set up a personal registry with them, or there are dedicated foundations that will let you set up an official registry with them. For example, the I Do Foundation will let you create a registry that goes to a charity of your choice, or Zank You Weddings will let you create a registry where each individual person that contributes will be able to decide which cause specifically their charity money will go.
Pure Capital Registry
There’s a saying about Gift Cards: they may be thoughtless gifts, but they’re rarely unused. And it’s true, there’s a purity to being honest about not knowing what to get someone. It makes no pretenses. A straight cash (or just donation) registry gives you the freedom to put the money wherever you want or need it. Wedding costs, honeymoon, mortgage –everything we’ve discussed. It’s simplicity from top to bottom. No registration with individual businesses or loan providers and by the end you and your partner have more capital to use as you see fit.
The backlash to this is that people think it takes the magic out of the getting someone a gift, or in the case of registries –the personalization of the individual gift; i.e. “but that fine china collection was supposed to be my contribution.” They do have a point. It begs the question: is a capital registry even a registry at all at that point, or is it basically just a slush fund for additional wedding gifts? The name registry applies specifically with registering with a store or organization, but considering all we’ve talked about this past three weeks, has the meaning of registry changed too? We’d prefer to evoke those questions within our readers than presume to answer them for you. But we’ll relent that something seems like it’s lost when you can’t look at that hand-crafted designer teakettle and attach a name and face to who’s responsible for you having it. In a pool of pure capital, the individual people that contribute can become lost in a sea of names. Or to put it another way: being able to devote half of your registry to household items and the other half to your honeymoon may be wonderful and practical, but the gravitas of the tradition can feel moot when the list of contributors is basically a spreadsheet.
You can mitigate the loss of this magic by writing individual thank you letters to everyone that donated to your registry (yes, on top of wedding thank you cards) and let them know how their personal contribution directly aided your post-wedding life. Such as “because you were kind enough to donate to our registry, my husband and I were able to pay off the medical bills we had put off for more than a year. Thank you –thank you so much, from the both of us.” Additional post wedding work? Certainly, but if your reservation about having a pure capital registry lies in that you’re worried people will think it lacks class, personalized thank you notes will go a long towards convincing people that not only was the decision pragmatic, but in fact, nothing was lost at all. It’s a fluid registry, for a century where people need to be fluid and constantly adapt.
