I’ve been wedding planning in some way, shape or form for about a year now. We knew we wanted a longer engagement. In order to both save money for the wedding to have one we’d love and to be able to share it with our loved ones. We also knew that we wanted enough time to plan and not feel entirely overwhelmed with decision making.
While I know in January, things will start rolling a bit quicker, I have discovered some things that would have been helpful to know when I first started, some seem so simple but I just didn’t think of it!
5 tips on beginning to plan your wedding
- Have fun! Enjoy your engagement before going down the whirl wind of wedding planning, it can be stressful so remember to take time to enjoy it.
- Plan your wedding based on how you want it to feel and keep those things in mind for every step of the way. (There are tons of ways to customize your wedding to your every want and whim. Having a firm understanding of how you want it to feel will help you realize what wants/needs really matter to your end goal.)
- Create a budget and then refine it as you go, remember to a lot monies to “unknowns”. We did an exercise where we did a rough estimate of our guest list. Then did some research on the types of venues we wanted to go with. This helped us determine what our budget would more realistically look like. (This will also be crucial if you aren’t sure if you want to do a destination wedding or keep it local.)
- Get your four majors out of the way first. Location venue, caterer, photographer/videographer, Entertainment ( band, DJ, other) these will most likely be the largest ticket items. We spent a few hours on various weekends attending credible bridal shows, both our DJ and our photographer we found through those shows.
- If you don’t know many people who have gotten married recently or have people to turn to check out groups online. I’m in a really awesome group on Facebook called I’m Engaged! Now What? and its amazing to get insight from across the world. Women and men from every ethnicity, culture, age and economic group. Whatever your budget there are people there to give advice from everything like future in laws to D.I.Y. decor.
Do you have any planning advice you wish you knew when you started?
I look forward to sharing some more gained wedding planning knowledge as we brave the planning process.
