Parenting

Startup Offers To Pay For Your Wedding By Gambling On Your Divorce

by Ashley Austrew

This startup will fund your wedding, as long as you don’t divorce.

Need some money to pay for your wedding? Well, all you have to do is place a bet on your own marriage and this new startup will help pay your way. It’s called SwanLuv, and they’ll fund your wedding up to $10,000, but there’s a catch: if you ever divorce, you have to pay them back…with interest.

Co-founder Scott Avy tells the Washington Post the way it works is pretty simple. SwanLuv reviews your relationship — using criteria he won’t reveal — and then sets an interest rate based on your compatibility. He won’t disclose the company’s range of interest rates, but says “they’re not too crazy.” Sure, Scott. Sounds legit.

The silver lining here is, even if your marriage goes kaput, SwanLuv simply takes the money you pay back to them and uses it to fund some other idealistic couple’s eventual failure. Avy tells the Post the idea came to him when a recently engaged roommate complained about wedding costs, and he thought, “Why should money get in the way of love?”

Despite how it looks, he says, the idea is not to swindle people out of their money. The company has supposedly gotten a ton of positive feedback and everyone involved thinks this is really a way to help people during a time when weddings are about as expensive as a college education. “Swans, they mate for life,” says Avy. “That’s what we’re trying to get behind, everlasting marriage.”

When you add up the numbers, this doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea. This year, a survey of 16,000 brides by the XO Group — the company that owns The Knot — showed the average wedding costs about $31, 213, and that’s not including the honeymoon. It makes total sense that couples are struggling to come up with the funds to throw these lavish affairs, and you can hardly blame them for looking for help wherever they can find it.

Still, according to Census Bureau statistics, 40 percent of marriages do end in divorce, and those are some crazy odds when you’re looking at repaying a loan with an “unspecified” interest rate. It’s tempting to sign on the dotted line, thinking you’re going to be the exception, but the truth is you never know what could happen down the road. It might be better to just reign in your wedding costs than to take a gamble on your own odds of divorce.

Either way, SwanLuv’s proposal makes couples sit back and take hard look at their real chances of staying in it for the long haul. That in itself could encourage people to make some smarter choices about their happily ever afters.