Just How Do You Go About Planning for Your Wedding?

Even if you’ve decided to hire a wedding planner/consultant (we look at this possibility in another post), it’s important for you to really understand the process of planning for a wedding.  There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle and unless you have done it a few times before (and even if you have), its time to get some education as to just how this works in order to save yourself a lot of frustration, time and money.  There are many books on the market on just how to do all of this.  The following are a couple of materials that I have researched and recommend depending on your objective.  Read on:

• In How to Plan a Fabulous Wedding, John Rehn (a male wedding planner no less, ladies) explores every aspect of planning your fabulous wedding!  Even though John saved over $11,000 on his own wedding, it was by far from a budget wedding. He shows you all of the tricks of the industry to find the best possible deals on everything from photographers, caterers, even on wedding dresses.  This is a 3 book series that covers all the nuts and bolts you need to know for planning your wedding day.

• The Wedding Planning Guidebook is like the text on planning a wedding.  It covers all of the 350 decisions that you have to make along the way.  Although it isn’t marketed as a budget wedding planner, it offers extremely valuable tips on just how to make that budget stretch farther.

• Then the last one is Wedding Planning on a Budget.  Authors Tim and Lisa Spooner married while in college and made the decision to not go into major debt to do it.  In fact, they decided that all they were spending on their wedding was $2,000!  Here they give you their valuable tips and unique ideas to help you plan your budget wedding that looks like a million bucks.

Their styles are a bit different as is their focus, but each of these books has all of the necessary worksheets, schedules, budgets, etc., for you to use every step of the way.   They address absolutely everything you need to know in order for your wedding day to be everything that you dream of including the invitations, locations, themes, caterers, photographers/videographers, bakers, etc., etc.  If you will just follow whichever system you choose, you will not end up being 'Frazzled Madge' but have a most beautiful moment as the beginning for sharing the rest of your lives together.


I highly recommend any one of them so take a look and decide which approach appeals to you the most.  If I were doing this again, I would personally look at getting either the first or second book and definitely Tim Spooner's book - it has such unique ideas which will really inspire you.  They are all downloadable so there is no wait to getting started.  (You can either click on them from this post or on their pictures at the top of the page.)