[Yonhap News Photo ]
South Korean parents suffer from a dearth of retirement savings after spending a significant amount of money on weddings by their children, a survey showed Thursday.
The wedding of kids cost 125 million won (107,296 US dollars) on average, or 55 percent of money saved by their parents for retirement, the research center of Samsung Life Retirement said in a survey of 868 parents with two children.
The survey found that the parents spent an average of 93.7 million won on the marriage of sons and 41.7 million won on that of daughters.
Some 63 percent of parents used more than 40 percent of their savings for children's weddings. After their children were married, 73 percent of the parents were suffering from a shortage of money to support themselves.
The survey found that nine out of 10 parents canceled savings products to finance the wedding of their children.
A Statistics Korea report in April showed that the number of marriages in South Korea fell to a record low last year as more young people delay their plans to find spouses amid economic woes.
In 2015, new marriages stood at an all-time low of 302,800, down 0.9 percent from a year earlier because young people are less interested in marriage due to costly housing expenses, unstable employment and high living and wedding costs.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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