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.  (more…)