If either of your parents is divorced, that will add a level of complication to your wedding finances because parents who are no longer married likely do not want to share the same costs of the wedding. If you’re looking for financial assistance from your divorced parents, you need to think seriously about the best way to approach this topic so that you do not cause any conflicts—and decide whether it makes sense to try to pay for your wedding without parental help.

Remember, relationships in every divorced situation are different. Here’s how my husband Bill and I worked things out with our divorced parents. We decided that the easiest way to pay for our wedding was to pay for everything ourselves. We didn’t want things to get too sticky when it came to money (money+par- ents=potential fights; money+divorced parents=potential world wars) and we were lucky enough to be able to work that out financially.

However, we also wanted to allow our parents the freedom to add their friends to our guest list, but we didn’t want the burden of paying for these extra guests who weren’t meaningful to us. So we came to a happy medium: we asked each of our parents to pick up the tab for the guests they’d invited. This decision permitted our parents to invite their friends without adding a financial burden to our wedding.

Most importantly, this decision allowed us to keep the peace among all the involved individuals during a time when things could have easily become ugly.