Work out what a wedding will cost in fifteen or twenty years, and the monthly SIP that funds it without touching your retirement savings.
What inflation rate should I use for a wedding?
There is no published index for it, and any calculator that quotes one precisely is inventing it. Wedding costs are driven by three things that move differently. Venue and catering track general inflation of 5% to 7%. Gold has its own cycle. The size of the guest list is a decision rather than a price. Use 7% as a starting point, and raise it if gold will be a large part of what you give.
Should I buy gold now instead of investing?
Buying some gold steadily does hedge the part of the budget that is jewellery, and Sovereign Gold Bonds pay interest on top of the price, which physical gold does not. But gold has gone nowhere for years at a time, and a wedding fifteen years out has enough runway for equity to do better. Splitting the goal between the two is a defensible answer; putting all of it in gold is not.
How much does waiting cost?
More than most people expect, and the figure is on this page. Three years of delay on a twelve year goal raises the instalment by about 60%, because you lose both the contributions and every year of growth those contributions would have had. The instalment is not proportional to the time left.
Should this money sit in the Sukanya Samriddhi account?
Only partly. Sukanya Samriddhi is a good, tax-free, government-backed place for a daughter’s money, and it pays more than most debt. But it only allows withdrawal at 18 and matures at 21, so it will not fit a wedding at a different age, and the ₹1.5 lakh yearly cap limits how much of the goal it can carry. Use it alongside a SIP, not instead of one.
Is it wrong to plan for this at all?
Plan for it, but rank it below your retirement. There are loans for a wedding and there are none for retirement, and a family that empties its retirement corpus for one becomes a burden on the same child it was spending on. If both cannot be funded, fund the retirement and hold a smaller wedding.
Where should the money be as the date gets close?
Out of equity. From about three years before, move it steadily into debt funds or a fixed deposit maturing near the date. A wedding date is fixed months in advance and a market fall does not care. The last year of it should be somewhere you can withdraw in a day.