This Site Makes It Easy for Wedding Guests to Contribute to Your Honeymoon
Wedding registries are nothing new.
For almost a century, newly engaged couples have been making lists of must-haves to help guide their friends and family in the quest for the perfect wedding gift.
A five-speed blender that can pulverize kale with the flick of a switch? List it.
A set of crystal goblets we’ll sip out of once every 10 years? List it.
A stack of decorative dish towels that will never actually be used to dry a single dish? Put it on the list.
But over the last few years, a new trend in wedding gifting — and requesting — has emerged: cash money.
(And frankly, we’re all for it.)
But with the rising popularity and acceptability of cash gifts at weddings (though many cultures have been celebrating this way for years!) coupled with our society’s need for ultimate convenience, it makes sense that a website specifically for cash registries would appear on the scene.
Enter: Honeyfund.
Honeyfund Helps Couples with Cash Wedding Registries
Honeyfund is a free online honeymoon registry service.
While its primary focus is on honeymoon expenses, it’s been described as “crowdfunding for newlyweds,” and that’s not entirely incorrect.
In addition to honeymoon funding, couples can also register for cash gifts to help cover “big-ticket items” like a new dishwasher, a down payment on a house or simply for a nest egg to build their new married life on.
Couples can set up a free page or pay a $40 fee to upgrade to an account with more functionality and fewer ads.
With either option, couples are able to customize a wishlist and share wedding day details with their guests.
Once you create an account, you can begin adding line items to your registry. These can be as broad as “five nights at a hotel” or as specific as “facials for two.” Honeyfund suggests default categories and price ranges for each item, but you can edit the information to reflect your needs more accurately.
Stephanie Bolling, a staff writer here at The Penny Hoarder, is using Honeyfund for her upcoming wedding. She used the site to register exclusively for her honeymoon, a trip to Europe that will include stops in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome.
Among her asks are “airfare,” “sightseeing tours,” “dining” and “transportation.” Each category is broken up into affordable chunks, and friends and family can choose a gift ranging from $25 to $50. (Which is about what they’d end up paying for a blender or a toaster oven, right?)
Depending on how you decide to cash out (using any combination of the following) there are different fee structures in place.
If you’re looking for convenience overall, you can use PayPal or WePay to cash out contributions. If you choose this option, you’ll pay a rate of 2.8% plus 30 cents for each transaction.
The new Honeyfund Balance program allows you to cash out your funds as gift cards through the site’s network of gift card providers (which includes stores like Delta, Amazon and Bed, Bath and Beyond). This option is completely fee-free.
You could also choose offline gifting, where you would list your needs on Honeyfund, but request that guests bring financial gifts in the form of cash or checks to the wedding itself. This would eliminate the cashing out fees entirely.
No matter which method you choose, wedding guests won’t pay a penny in fees.
Traditional Wedding Registries Aren’t Entirely Out
For the couples who may still need a few household items, or those with more traditional family and friends not keen on donating money to a vacation, Honeyfund allows users to integrate a traditional, in-store and online wedding registry on the site.
Even if your main focus is on collecting enough cash to get to Jamaica, it can be helpful to give guests another option when it comes to gifting — and will help you avoid awkward interactions with guests who simply can’t stray from tradition.
Couples can create a registry at a store like Crate & Barrel or Bed, Bath & Beyond and link it directly to their Honeyfund account.
Your guests can click through, pick a gift and either ship it directly to you (depending on the store’s capabilities) or purchase it and bring it to be placed on the gift table.
Looking to make the process even smoother, Target recently announced plans to partner with Honeyfund to allow users to create or shop a registry from a single destination.
But Cash Registries Are Definitely In
In this day and age, most couples either already share a home stocked with all the colanders, sheets and soap dispensers they can fit, or are merging two separate homes into one — and deciding which set of pots and pans to ditch.
And while some people are taken aback by the concept as a whole, a cash registry can be really helpful to couples just starting out at a critical (and often pretty financially strapped) point in their lives.
Alexa Vincent, photo coordinator at The Penny Hoarder, used Honeyfund for her wedding registry back in 2015.
While she and her now-husband asked friends and family to help them pay for their honeymoon trip to the Florida Keys, the couple gave guests another choice as well.
“We also gave them the option to help with the down payment for a home if they wanted to contribute to that instead,” Vincent said.
So while it’s not exactly dishware and bathmats, it was a more concrete need that guests could help the couple pay for.
And that seems like a fair compromise all around.
I mean, snorkeling in crystal clear waters is pretty awesome, but so is having a starter home to come back to when the adventure is over.
Grace Schweizer is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder.
