You’re engaged! Congratulations!
If you’re anything like me then you’ve had an amazing day telling your family and friends the good news and now you’ve settled down for the evening together to start planning your wedding.
Your head is full of ideas, you’re excited and you can’t wait to get started, but where do you start?! You’ve opened Google, typed in “planning a wedding” and no doubt you’ve been bombarded with about a million and one lists of things to get done. It’s so overwhelming!
I thought I’d do you a small blog with how to start planning your day. These are the groundworks for the rest of the day and there’s pretty much no point in starting to think about the rest until you’ve thought about these things.
First thing’s first – I know you want to look at venues but with different capacities you need to know how many people will be there. You’ll want a day list and an evening list.
Top Tip – to save forgetting anyone use your contact lists on your phone and social media
Now that you have a rough idea of numbers you’ll want to decide on a budget between you, so say what you have in mind and then meet in the middle (because from my experience one of you will have a very high figure in mind and the other a very low figure!). This will likely affect your guest list and you may want to cut it back.
Top Tip – struggling to cut back on your numbers? Have you seen this person in the last few years? Have you even met this person (probably more valid for your other halves family members)? If it weren’t your wedding would you be willing to spend £45* on a meal for them?
The average total cost of a wedding is £16,005* (not including the honeymoon and engagement ring) with about half of that being spent on the venue and catering. The day of the week you choose to get married and the time of year will affect this though so keep that in mind if you’re wanting a Saturday wedding in the height of summer.
Next you need to decide on when you want to get married. If you’re paying for everything yourself then the easiest thing to do it take your budget and divide it by the amount of money you can save per month. Too far away? Look at your budget again. One thing to bear in mind is that you may need a large chunk of the funds up front. This is something we totally forgot so when we booked our honeymoon we were in need of the money that wouldn’t be available until the wedding day – woops.
And there you go! You’ve made a good start to your wedding planning.
*I got the above information from the Bridebook 2020 UK Wedding Report. They have a great planning site with loads of planning tools, ideas and inspiration and supplier lists. I used them for my wedding too.
Like what you see here? Contact me for a chat about your plans and to find out more about what I can do for your big day.
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