Many kids are paying for their weddings. Do some research on-line about this subject and show him how its a dying custom.

It's nothing more than another way of paying a dowry. Selling a bride - paying money to the grooms family to get rid of her (now they don't have to pay half. Worthless females. The girl should be insulted.

Half of them are practice weddings anyway in that they'll end up in divorce.

I don't believe your feelings are wrong or unwarranted. you married believing that you would share a future and make those decisions together (and rightly so). but, he is still living his single life where finances were his own. that's not the case any more. you are going to have to put your foot down here. tell him he's already spent more of your joint money on his kids and ex than will ever happen with your kids. fair is fair and enough is enough. if you cannot get him to see reason, you need to split your finances asap. see what he can afford on his own. do not touch the savings you have accumulated yourself to go towards this. tell him that you will not allow him to bankrupt your marriage so that his kids can have the best of everything. they're grown, making adult decisions and have a family of their own. if they want to get married, they can pay for it. and I have to say that if he was expecting to pay for this wedding, he should have saved for it.

You feel like you’re getting the short end of the stick because you are! I just wrote a long response but it didn’t stick but bottom line- the bride and groom need to plan a wedding they can afford. I think it would be a nice gesture to contribute something relatively inexpensive like the flowers or a dress under 1k, but there is no way in hell anyone should go into debt or use the money they have saved for a house for a wedding. My DH and I got married 2 years ago and no one in our family offered to help financially, so we went away just the 2 of us. We couldn’t/didn’t want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to entertain other people when we could go away for a fraction of the cost and use that money on more important things.

So he paid his ex wife alimoney when she was shacking up with a man in another state? And did she ever have to pay child support to your husband or did she give up the kids?

I don't see a problem with your DH wanting to pay all or most of her wedding. I do think she should contribute... be it 1/2 or a %.

I agree with LadyFace and think you've got a bit of a double standard going here.

Honestly, I don't think either of you is "wrong". It's not even about whether it's reasonable for a father to pay for his daughter's wedding, if he wants to and has the money. The actual problem is that you think you should have veto power over that decision, and he doesn't. You're not at all on the same page about "how do we decide what to spend money on?". THAT is the issue you need to address.

You don't mention if you work or not, but if you don't then you're in a much weaker position to demand that you have power to decide what he spends money on. You're completely within your rights to demand that YOUR money not be spent on a wedding, if you're helping contribute to that savings. But it sounds like your DH sees money more as "yours -vs- mine" while you see it all as co-mingled.

Let me ask you something. Let's say you wanted to use some money that you'd saved (however you saved it) to buy your son a new car, and your DH said you weren't allowed to for whatever reason. What would your reaction be? Does that make it at all easier to see where your DH is coming from? Because you BOTH need to be able to see each other's view points if you're going to discuss this. (And to get your DH to understand it, ask him how he would feel if, instead of using your savings to help buy a house, you spent it all on your kids instead.)

the short version of my advice: If you share finances, you need to have shared financial goals. If you can't have shared financial goals, you need to have separate finances.

the longer version:
You two need to get on the same page with regard to finances. My advice: put the SD wedding aside for a minute and just sit down with your budget and figure out how much money is left over at the end of the month / year whatever that is not needed for your retirement, living expenses and other large forecast outflows (like your new house down payment, or if one of you needs a new car). Then take a look at the amount that's left over and see how much of it you think makes sense to spend on the kids, and start discussing how it should be spent. And try to understand and have compassion for where he's coming from - there are a lot of cultural narratives around the "father of the bride" and he's probably feeling indirect/implicit social pressure to show he's a provider / good dad / "real man" etc. But there should be room for compromise between what he wants and want you see can really be afforded, go into the discussion remembering you are partners on the same team, and believing you will find a number you can both be satisfied with.

I feel your pain, it's so hard to be in agreement when you feel like your kids are literally in competition with his for financial resources. I don't have kids, but I sometimes feel like I am in competition with the kids for financial resources. There's only so much money to go around and even if there were only two of us in the relationship, it's still a lot of communication and negotiation to spend the money fairly.

Good luck and keep us posted!