India is known for the way its people celebrate weddings. It’s a unification of colours, sounds, food and everything that you can associate with this day. Each region has its own set of rituals, traditions that are followed.
If North Indian weddings are extravagant and boisterous, South Indian weddings are rather very simple and are a sort of sober affair. A Tamil wedding especially may be high on traditional rituals but it is very low in terms of the extravaganza. But like every wedding, it involves the exchange of gifts including clothes and gold jewellery, which come at a cost.
They also have their own set of rituals that need to be followed. If you are a Tamilian and getting married you may have a general idea about them. You may also know about the kind of expenses that can be incurred before, during and after the wedding.
Let’s take a look at some of the rituals of the wedding and how you can handle them financially:
Sumangali Prarthanai: It is a ritual whereby a pooja is performed around married women or sumangalis. Prayers are offered to them, and the bride-to-be also seeks their blessings for a prosperous married life ahead. This ritual involves gifting of traditional nine-yard sarees and after the Pooja, a feast. This is the first expense that you will come across. Instead of dipping into your parent’s saving or your own, you can avail a personal loan for your wedding.
Naandi Shrardham: A special Pooja conducted by both sides of the family, involving a feast of 10 Brahmins and offering prayers for their respective ancestors. This ritual can be expensive as the meal that you would serve the guests would be a feast. The wedding loan we mentioned about can take care of the expense that will rise from this ritual.
Nichayathartham: Nichayathartham is like the North Indian custom of engagement. The event starts off with Ganesh puja performed by the bride’s family. This is also the time when she is gifted a rich Kanjeevaram and gold jewellery. However, this is not a single sided affair as the bride’s family has to do the same. Since it involves jewellery and other gifts, a personal loan for the wedding will be able to fund this.
So far we have seen that almost every event calls for gifts including jewellery and clothes. It also includes food. It is not always possible to fund all this with your mere savings, and hence it is advisable to take a wedding loan to finance all these events and the gifts that form an inherent part of these events.
This was just the before. Now, when you look at the rituals during the wedding day, you will realise that it can also include a lot of other expenses:
- Mangal Snanam: Unlike North Indian weddings that happen over band Bajabaraat in the evenings, Tamil weddings take place in the mornings. After the Mangal Snanam, where both the groom and the bride, are smeared with a paste of turmeric, sandalwood paste and oils head to the temple for blessings. Now, you must be wondering how is this expensive. Well, since it is the wedding day, the bride will be wearing her traditional wedding sari and be adorned with her wedding jewellery. This expense will have to be taken care of before the wedding day.
- Kashi Yatra and Pada Puja: This is a fun event and while has no financial bearing is an important event. This ritual involves enacting a small play where the groom pretends to be heading for a pilgrimage to Kashi and is only stopped after the bride’s father persuasion agrees to marry his daughter. Once at the wedding mandap, he is welcomed by his would-be mother-in-law and finally joins his partner for the wedding ceremony.
- The final phase: At the final phase of the wedding, the bride and the groom are joint in holy matrimony through various small customs including exchanging of garlands and the ‘kanyadan’ and the groom ties a traditional taali and a toe ring is put on the bride. A taali is a gold pendant and the toe ring is to be pure silver. Silver and gold are not cheap and a wedding loan can help in buying those things.
Now, everything mentioned above is a costly affair. The wedding loan that we spoke about can help.
So how can a wedding loan help and how do you avail one?
A wedding loan can sponsor all your wedding-related expenses, especially the expensive gifts, without having to count the cash in your wallet after every transaction. You can buy all the expensive jewellery and book a good place so that the wedding takes place with ease and comfort.
How do you avail one? The process is simple. Many financial institutions like Tata Capital have personal loan eligibility criteria. You can check the same on the website of these institutions.
Wedding loan interest rates in reputed financial institutions such as Tata Capital are similar to that of personal loan
interest rates that is 11.49 to 19%. Depending upon your credit score, wedding loan of upto 15 lakh can be offered. If you do not want to take a loan by yourself you and your partner can take a joint loan.
An institution like Tata Capital also offers an interesting 50-50 Wedding loans for Equals scheme, where the to-be bride and groom jointly take up this personal loan, and as co-borrowers, repay the loan equally. Under this scheme, a maximum of Rs 5 lakh is given as a wedding loan for a tenure of one to three years.
To know your tentative EMI before officially applying for the loan, you can use a personal loan EMI calculator. The personal loan EMI calculator will give you a rough idea about the amount you will have to shell out as EMI if you take a particular sum as a wedding loan. Personal loan EMI calculators are available on the websites of all reputed banks and financial institutions such as Tata Capital. You will just have to key in your principal amount, personal loan tenure and interest rate, and the value of your EMI will immediately be revealed. After checking this, you can take a call on how much you can afford to pay off from your salary every month, and thereby apply for a wedding loan with your desired tenure. The higher the tenure, the lower will be your EMI, the lower the tenure, the higher will be your EMI.
Before you avail a wedding loan, do a rough calculation based on the rituals you will follow and get a general idea on the same. A Tamilian wedding, unlike others, maybe sober in nature. However, each ritual being of importance can and is followed and a wedding loan at times like these is the answer for all the monetary needs!
