Hot New Wedding Gift: Cash for Home Renovations

With the cost of everything rising, included are home renovations.  Many couples headed to the altar have taken matters into their hands and come up with a creative new way to finance their new design.  Instead of offering guests the typical choices, they sign up for an online cash-gift registry to put toward a home-renovation fund to update their space. Wedding-day gift envelopes add to the fund.  A growing number of registry users are flat out asking for cash, for everything from down payments to help with modernizing a kitchen.

The cash-gift option grows tremendously year over year with contributions to home registries second only to honeymoon funds.  In the 18 months ending in August, about 19,500 users have created a cash-gift fund for home-related projects.  Home-related registries are on the rise at crowd-funding website DepositaGift.com.  People want cash gifts for any type of event  and pooling money for housing projects is a logical extension of that.  The plan seems to work in the homebodies’ favor: On average, users of the site gave $120 to home registries, compared with $100 to honeymoon funds in the past year.

In Alexandria, VA., a couple  collected about $7,000 from an online registry.  The couple plan to use the money to defray the cost of buying a condo in the Park Fairfax area.

Still, gift etiquette can be tricky.  Some people thought it was very rude and forward to ask  for cash. They were usually older.  Other couples insist that if guests must give gifts, it might as well be cash.  You say you don’t want anything, but people want to give, and if you don’t channel them, they’ll give you stuff that you don’t want.

From MSN Real Estate