My beautiful daughter has her first serious boyfriend. She’s 25 years old, so I’m not buying a hat just yet – but it has given me a nudge to think about one of the quieter jobs of being a parent: handing on the things you’ve learned – both those that went well, and those that did not.
And there’s one mistake about love and money that really sticks in my mind: my wedding.
To be clear, I don’t regret getting married in the slightest – Jasmine and I are about to mark our 30th year together. But the other week we went through some of our old wedding photos and I realised I hadn’t seen half the people in those pictures for years. These people had a fantastic free dinner and dance, celebrated one of the most important days of our lives, and are now no longer in it.
Shorts
The wedding and honeymoon cost tens of thousands of pounds. But as I look back on that day and that money now, I wonder what that money could be worth now if we had opted for a simple ceremony and invested the cash instead. A typical long-term market return could have turned it into the best part of half a million pounds by now.
