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What Ifs... and other Scary Questions you should ask while Planning your Wedding: A lesson from Brooklyn 99

I am a worrier.

Most of my life, you can find me organizing my life so that things run smoothly and the people around me do not have to stress. It might just be one of the reasons I fell so easily into wedding photography. There is a whole lot of things going on during a wedding and I’ve always found it really full fulling to be able to juggle it all and make sure things get done that need doing.

Anyone planning a wedding, inherently, is a worriers too.

How can you not? There are a dozen vendors to book, a hundred payments to keep track of and a million little details that just keep popping up like the worst game of wack-a-mole you can imagine. Seating charts, Guests lists, invitations, showers, and on and on and on and on.

I get asked “What happens if you can’t photograph our wedding?” by a lot of couples during the planning process and the general answer is that I work with a group of photographers that work together to help out and fill in if one of us (my analogy) “gets hit by a bus.” It’s funny because the chances of getting hit by a bus are WAY slim. (2 in a million; I just looked it up)

Asking that question to your wedding photographer makes sense. Most of your other vendors are big company while, more than likely, your photographer is an idivdual. But its not just the individuals you need to worry about. All the best laid plans cannot always prevent Final Destination levels of fate. What if your wedding photographer gets into a car accident on the way to the wedding ceremony? What if a tree falls on your DJ’s car? What if your catering company burns down or your wedding venue goes out of business?

There is a lot of trust when it comes to choosing your wedding vendors. You trust that they will do what ever they can to get to your wedding and help you pull off your dream, but what if they can’t? Most wedding contracts have a clause stating that they can’t be held liable for acts of god and/or situations that are outside of their control. Makes sense…but where does that leave you?

Wedding Insurance.

Wedding Insurance pays you back if your best man drops your wedding ring through the slats of a dock into a river. It pays you back if your wedding gets rescheduled because a tornado hits your venue.

I’ve been talking to my clients about wedding insurance for a while now, but it took watching the new season of Brooklyn 99 (nine-nine!) to decide to write a blog about it. I figure a lot of people are going to go…wait…what is wedding insurance?

Just like homeowners, renters or travelers insurance, Wedding insurance pays you back if something goes wrong at your wedding. Sometimes, depending on what kind of coverage you choose, they can even pay you back all the money you’ve spent so you can have a do-over (or you can do what Jake and Amy did and just go on a blow out honeymoon because you’re going to need to relax if your wedding venue gets ran over by a tornado).

There are lots of different companies out there, so I recommend asking your own insurance agent who they recommend or doing some google sleuthing for the perfect amount of coverage you need.