Aileen Farrell and her fiance Eric Terrien are getting married in August. They have been living together and figured money would be the most useful gift to them. They registered a joint savings account at TD Bank so wedding guests could contribute directly there.
Aileen Farrell and Eric Terrien don't need monogrammed Egyptian cotton towels.
Ms. Farrell, 25, and Mr. Terrien, 29, have been co-habitating for 10 months and plan to tie the knot in August in Ottawa.
Last fall, when Ms. Farrell, an administrative assistant and part-time ski racing coach, was setting up her wedding website, she stalled on the registry section.
She told her father, "This is so annoying. We're already living together. We have everything that you can think of."
He offered her a suggestion: registering at their bank.
She took his advice. On their wedding website, the couple have instructions to call their local TD Canada Trust branch to make a deposit directly to their joint savings account.
"We don't need the material stuff any more," Ms. Farrell says.
Instead, she's hoping to use cash contributions to renovate their basement or redo their backyard. She and her fiancé are also planning a second, more elaborate, honeymoon in 2012 for soccer's Euro cup in Poland.
Many soon-to-be-weds have dismissed the standard registry as stuffy, impractical and outdated. The contemporary set now register with travel agents to plan six-week escapes to Fiji. Others register at art galleries in hopes that wedding guests will help pay for a pricey painting. Some wine connoisseurs even create registries to expand their cellared collection of vintage bottles.
"For many, many years, weddings were about the tradition of the wedding and marriage," says Lisa Cable, a wedding planner in Vancouver. "It's evolved more into the celebration of the unique lives of the couple."
Entrepreneurs have spotted great business opportunities in the alternative registry trend. Sites such as downpaymentdreams.com and ehoneymoonregistry.com have cropped up as channels for couples to collect cash gifts.
In January, Victoria real-estate agents Christina Carrick and Patricia Kiteke launched Home for the Honeymoon (homeforthehoneymoon.com), which they bill as Canada's first down-payment registry site.
Ms. Kiteke says many newlyweds she's worked with are interested in buying kid-friendly houses with yards rather than condominiums, but often need financial assistance from friends and family to make down payments.
A registry offers a socially acceptable way to ask for help, she says. And couples receive assistance from real-estate agents on purchasing a home. The company takes a 7-per-cent cut of guests' contributions.
Newlyweds Janine and Martin Evers set up a last-minute registry on the site two weeks before their January wedding and used the $10,000 worth of contributions to top up the $35,000 they had in hand to put a down payment on a $478,000 four-bedroom house in Edmonton.
"Paying that much more on your mortgage made a huge difference," Ms. Evers, a 30-year-old esthetician, says.
The shifting idea of the wedding registry fits with marriage trends. Canadians are marrying later and often shack up before they get hitched.
In 1972, the average ages for first marriages among Canadians was 22.2 for women and 24.7 for men, according to Statistics Canada. In 2004, it was 28.5 for women and 30.5 for men.
Co-habitation before marriage has also been on the rise in the past few decades. Though many common-law couples never marry, it's worth noting that in 1981, common-law unions made up 6 per cent of all families and in 2001, that figure rose to 14 per cent.
While today's engaged couples are happy to reject traditionalism, their families are not always receptive.
In Ms. Farrell's case, some thought her savings account registry was gauche. "My mom at first was a little taken aback when I told her … she thinks it's a complete slap in the face to the idea of marriage."
To placate the traditionalists, she and her fiancé registered at Sears, Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Kelly Hill, a 27-year-old social media marketing manager in Austin, Tex., was also forced to make a small conventional registry to appease her fiancé's grandmother, who "wanted to give a gift [they]could unwrap.
"We put up a thing at Pottery Barn and checked a bunch of things we didn't really need," she says.
Ms. Hill pointed all other guests toward a page on her wedding website where she had a PayPal link for invitees and friends to contribute to her and her fiancé's down payment fund. She also posted photos of a house they were eyeing. "People don't like the idea of putting money toward something when they don't have a visual picture of it in their heads," she says. They had only 56 guests at their February, 2010, wedding but pulled in more than $12,000, which they paired with the $5,800 they had in the bank to put toward a down payment. They purchased a house in November.
Sarah Shore, a principal planner at Dreamgroup Productions wedding and event planning in Vancouver, says couples can tell family and members of their wedding party to spread the word about alternative registries, or include a page on their wedding website.
While mentioning registries on invitations is a major no-no, Ms. Cable says, couples must find some way to communicate their wishes clearly to their guests.
A friend of hers recently married wrote, "No gifts, please" on her invitations in hopes that guests would instead give cash to use for a down payment on a house.
Most people didn't pick up on the subtext. Of the 150 guests who attended the wedding, only two brought gifts for the newlyweds - the others showed up empty-handed.
Dakshana Bascaramurty