Daughter Elopes — Father Spends Her Wedding Fund On New Car

Apr 28, 2021 by apost team

A man went to a Reddit forum to talk about how he spent his daughter’s wedding fund on March 31, 2021. He set aside $35 thousand to use to help pay for his daughter’s wedding but ended up not needing to use it. His daughter and her now-husband began dating in college and were engaged for just over a year before finally tying the knot in a typically unconventional way. After not being able to thoroughly plan a wedding over the past year, his daughter and her fiance decided to elope on a trip with just the two of them. This meant that the father now thought he no longer needed to save that money and decided to put it to good use.

He went to the social media forum to ask for advice on what to do since he was unaware if he had made a controversial decision by choosing to spend the money. While it’s tradition for the bride and her family to pay for the wedding, it made sense that this father would have set aside such a large sum of cash for the investment. Marriage is beautiful, and a wedding ceremony typically is the way many couples celebrate the milestone. With decorations, floral arrangements, delicious food and so much more, wedding planning has become its own industry and quite an expensive one at that. 

In a turn of events, this man’s daughter decided not to go through a traditional wedding, meaning that fund was no longer needed. With a hefty amount of money sitting in his bank account, the father decided to spend it on a new car and a fun vacation.

In his Reddit post, the father talked about what led him to use his daughter’s wedding fund for his own fun and joy. “My car has been having some trouble lately, so I decided to just treat myself and get a new car in cash with the wedding fund,” he wrote. The car cost him around $30,000, so he and his wife used the remaining money to go on their own vacation. “I didn’t think this was controversial,” the father said about his decision to use the money he had set aside.

The daughter knew about the saved money and decided that she still wanted to see if she could use it for her own needs. She asked her dad if it would be possible to use the money for a down payment on a future home she could share with her now-husband, according to the Reddit post. The father begrudgingly had to tell his little girl that he had already spent all the money, explaining precisely what each dollar went toward. “To say she was upset is an understatement,” the father wrote. According to his original Reddit post, he had never actually said that the money was specifically for his daughter’s wedding or her amusement in general.

After editing his original post, the father gave more insight into his background and relationship with his daughter, specifically regarding their mindsets on how the money should have been spent. He clarified that the money was, in fact, for the wedding as it was something he and his daughter had discussed a year prior when she first got engaged. 

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It also “came up at times before that, too,” the dad wrote. “Just something I planned for due to having a daughter,” he explained about setting the money aside.

“I never told her it was a fund for her to use on whatever,” he clarified. This dad had been doing his best to set his child up for success while still having some boundaries. “I paid for her college and planned on paying for her wedding but beyond that didn’t plan on paying her way through life,” he explained. The father went on to talk about how he grew up struggling with money and was unable to go to college himself, which is why it was so important for him to be able to pay for his daughter’s education. He was only 19-years-old when his daughter was born, meaning he needed to grow up pretty quickly himself and figure out how to support a family. 

“I always did my best to save and be responsible with money so I could help her start off the right way,” he said. He eventually had to put his foot down and choose to put himself and his own needs first as his daughter is grown and fully capable of making her own decisions.

The comments came flooding in, some positive and some negative. While ultimately it was the father’s own decision on what to do with his money, he had asked for outside opinions and got plenty of them. “Basically what I’ve gathered from the vast majority is that I didn’t do anything ‘wrong,’ but I should have communicated more clearly,” he wrote in his final edit of the post. He ended the conversation by thanking everyone who read and commented on his post.

What did you think about this story? Should the father have spent the money originally saved for his daughter’s wedding? Let us know, and be sure to send this along to your friends and family.