Wedding Planning Start-up

It’s Wedding Wednesday!  At least I have now designated a day that is dedicated to Wedding things - A little tribute to our recent wedding and some inspiration/tips/tricks for all of you out in the blog world.  Our whole wedding day was beyond anything I dreamed of.  Everything came together perfectly and I didn’t stress one bit ‘day of’… really!  We had the most fantastic family and friends there to celebrate with us.  My word ‘day of’ was “Yay Marriage!” J

So, today it is all about starting your long adventure of wedding planning.  After Hubs proposed, I started surfing the web for ideas.  It was pretty easy for us to pinpoint the type of wedding location we wanted.  We are boaters by summer and skiers by winter.  Since we wanted to have our wedding somewhat local and wanted to bask in some lovely sunny weather, “On the Water” was it. 

But, before we made a hit list of locations to visit, we needed to know what we could spend on our venue which meant we needed to know how much we could spend overall on our wedding.  If you have no idea what a “good budget number” is, do a little Google search.  This will give you a feel for how much certain aspects of your wedding can cost.  I had done this before / talked with friends to get an idea of what their budget was for their wedding.  I realized that you will spend half of your money on the venue, food, and bar and I was amazed at how much invitations and cakes can cost!  Then, it is most important to have “the talk” with whoever is paying for most of the wedding before you start anything.  I wouldn’t schedule meetings with vendors until you have accomplished this task, no matter how daunting and/or scary it may seem.  Honestly, I thought it would be easy to approach my parents and say “hey mom / dad, what you got to spend on this shin-dig?”.  But, in all honesty it was very difficult – I didn’t want my parents to feel that I ‘expected’ them to foot the bill.  But lo and behold we got our magic number and made sure to include everything - honeymoon, rehearsal dinner included ... anything that 'smelled' like 'wedding'.

Once we knew our “target number” I then did a quick Google search for a budget breakdown.  I used Wedding Wire’s (www.weddingwire.com) budget tool which allowed me to plug in my overall number and it in turn spit out a nice little breakdown of what to expect to spend on each category.  Once I tweaked the numbers based on subsequent vendor research my budget looked like this:

I will probably elaborate more on this another time, as this was just a guide in the beginning and I cut costs in categories by DIY-ing and finding ways to save money.  But, all in all, making a budget was paramount to the beginning of the wedding planning process and one you don’t want to skip over because it could lead to a broken heart down the road when you start looking at all the different vendors.