Do you need wedding insurance? How should you go about deciding whether or not you need to take out a wedding insurance package? Are there any guides, any measures, any way at all of determining whether or not it would be a good safety net for you to take advantage of?

Well, the good news is that yes, there is one very simple way in which you can tell whether you need wedding insurance or not. It will only take you a few minutes, so just grab a calculator and a bit of paper, give yourself a five minutes and you can easily tell whether you would benefit from a policy.

The first step is to list everything that's going to cost you money at your wedding. Depending upon how organised and well planned you are already this may take you less time or more time, but where you don't have exact figures, and approximation is good enough.

The average wedding in the UK is currently costing around £20,000, although obviously there are many weddings which cost more than this, and others costing considerably less. If you haven't already added up the total cost of your wedding then this may be something of a shock, so be warned!

It is, however, essential to make sure you have a pretty accurate and comprehensive figure in front of you before understanding whether or not you would benefit from having a wedding insurance policy.

Once you have carried out all of the sums, added up all of your costs and arrived at a figure that's alarmingly high, the next stage is to ask one very simple question. How easily could you double that? In other words, if your wedding costs £20,000, how easy would it be for you to cope if the costs were doubled, and you had to stump up a total of £40,000?

For some people this would be terribly easy. The kind of person who has a gold plated mobile phone, a private jet and a penthouse in at least 3 major cities around the world is likely to shrug off such a trivial inconvenience.

However, if that doesn't sound like you, and the prospect of doubling your budget would simply result in you having to either cancel your wedding or postpone it indefinitely, then wedding insurance is most definitely something you should think about.

But why? Surely doubling the cost of the wedding isn't likely to happen? Whilst it's unlikely that your suppliers and service providers will all double their prices, if anything goes wrong leading up to your wedding day, you could find yourself having to postpone or cancel the wedding, which would result in you losing everything you have invested in it.

If you've paid for services, and cancelled, in many cases you won't get your money back. You will certainly lose your deposits, but you may also find that you're contractually obliged to pay for the agreed service even if you're subsequently unable to take advantage of it.

This could easily cost you many thousands of pounds, and could cost you your wedding. For the price of a couple of bottles of wine you can get a wedding insurance policy that gives you more than a financial safety net - it gives you peace of mind.