{wedding wednesday: the planning}

Sorry for the break last week, but I’m so very ready to jump back into things. This week we’re talking about the first few steps in the planning process; the things you need to do before you start anything else.

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Whether you have a specific month or season in mind for your wedding, choosing a date can be difficult. There are a variety of factors that can go into choosing a date, such as the availability of your vendors, the price of your venue, and whether or not you have a special date in mind {such as an anniversary}.

The following is a partial infographic from Wedding Wire, with statistics about wedding dates:

You can view the entire infographic here.

Popular months and days for weddings are popular for a reason. Summer and Saturdays usually work for most people, since they either don’t work or are able to get time off to travel to a wedding. But, there are a lot of factors that go into choosing a wedding date and you don’t necessarily have to follow those rules.

If you are on a budget {we’ll talk about that below}, venues and vendors will often offer a discount {sometimes a steep one} if you get married on a Friday or Sunday, or in the off season {usually November through February}. It’s worth it to ask if your venue or vendors offer one if you are looking to save money and are willing to compromise on the date or day of the week.

Sometimes, however, you may be set on a season or month, and that’s alright! In that case, you might just need to be more open minded about finding a venue {if you’re planning last minute} and choosing vendors.

Holiday weddings have their advantages and disadvantages, and everyone will have opinion about them {be warned}. If you have your heart set on a holiday weekend, you’ll just need to understand that not everyone with be as enthusiastic about it, or even willing to come. But in the same vein, if you’re looking to cut the guest list, a holiday wedding might be the way to go.

The budget really is one of, if not the, first things you need to do when planning your wedding. If you don’t, I guarantee you will spend a lot more than you anticipate. Here is a great infographic {I’m loving infographics today…} about the true cost of a wedding.

It might sound scary {and it kind of is}, but the average cost of a wedding is around $26,000, depending on your location. If you’d like to know how much a weddings costs, on average, in your area, you can enter your zip code in here to get the breakdown. But, that doesn’t have to mean anything if you decide from the beginning how much you are willing to spend on your wedding.

Wedding Wire has a really great calculator for budgeting and how to allocate your funds, as well as tracking payments:

Traditionally, it is the bride’s family who pays for the majority of the wedding.

But.

It is no longer considered appropriate to expect anyone to pay for your wedding, or even contribute. If your parents or grandparents offer to help, then that’s different, and its alright to ask how much they are willing to give {though you should wait for them to bring it up before asking}.

Regardless of who pays, I would highly recommend allocating a portion of your budget, from 5 to 10%, on unexpected costs and splurges.

Seriously though, don’t be concerned by that number up there. I planned my wedding on a budget of less than $5,000, and you can too. I’ll post another time about my favorite ways to save money on a wedding.

This is where it gets fun. We will have a post later this month about choosing your colors and theme, but before you can choose those, you need to find inspiration.

Like mots people these days, my favorite tool for this is {obviously} Pinterest, but there are a lot of blogs and other resources out there that you can use as well.

Lover.ly is a newer tool that is similar to Pinterest, but is exclusively for wedding inspiration. Some of the top blogs and vendors put their content on the website {you can’t put images on the site, only specified users can}, so sources are always linked {which is nice for us bloggers}.

I’ve created a page on my website so that you can see some of my favorite blogs and other planning resources. You can check them out to see what I use, and what I recommend for my clients.

You can link up your posts below. Remember, you don’t need to post about this week’s topic in order to link up. Any wedding-related post will do!

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