Last summer I was fortunate enough to marry the man of my dreams, however the wedding planning almost got the best of me!  I was living in Minnesota at the time and the wedding was in California so planning everything from afar presented quite a challenge.  When the stress having a wedding to plan started to mount, I gave in and hired a wedding planner – BIG mistake!  Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure those with larger budgets will find having a wedding planner to be invaluable.  However, I was not willing to pay $4,000 just for the wedding planner fees.  So I opted for a partial wedding planner, which cost me $1,500 to email me a couple vendors and show up for only half the wedding while I still did all the work.  Therefore, I offer you these tips to avoid this little disaster. 

First of all you need to get organized!  The very first thing you need to do is get your tentative guest as every vendor will ask for this and you cannot book anything without it.  Once you have an idea of how large your wedding is going to be, make a list of venues and start visiting.  Once you lock down your guest list and venue you can start to book everything else.  Make sure you purchase some sort of wedding planner to keep everything organized.  One wedding planner program that was instrumental to my organization was the My Style Wedding planning software.  This computer software is invaluable when you have a wedding to plan.  Input every detail of your special day including your guest list, vendor information, seating arrangements, and budget.  When you update your plans you can share your ideas with your loved ones and those helping with the wedding planning.  Create a virtual scene of your wedding and upload pictures of your flower arrangements, table settings, decorations, even you and your groom and see your event come to life!

Once you are organized the rest will fall into place.  The wedding planning software will show you what tasks still need to be done to keep you on track and will give you a comprehensive budget to make sure you don’t get out of hand.  Remember when you have a wedding to plan it is best to allow at least a year, if possible, and start booking everything as soon as possible.

Tags: Plan your wedding, Wedding Plan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under The Bride, Wedding Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.