Your wedding might be the most joyous occasion in your life, but planning the wedding is likewise one of the biggest challenges you will ever face. Planning a wedding takes a lot of time and coordination. While you can leave some of the plans for weeks before the wedding, you have to address others early on.
That is why you need to start planning your wedding at least a year earlier if time allows it. From booking a venue to finding a reliable limo service like Stay Classy or hiring a photographer, you can’t leave these important items for later or you might face a serious challenge later on. That’s stress you don’t need and can easily avoid.
In this article, we are going to list some of the aspects of your wedding planning you need to address early on.
Determine Your Budget
Before you start planning anything, you need to set your budget. This will determine all the other steps on this wonderful journey. This is a tough conversation to have with your future spouse, but one you need to have as soon as possible after the engagement.
Sit down together with your parents or alone and figure out who will be helping you out financially and how much they can offer before determining your total budget.
Choose a Few Open Dates
The biggest mistake soon-to-be-weds make is focusing on a single date for their wedding. No matter how special the date you were eying might be (like the day you met), you need to have at least two or three potential dates set.
Think about the time of the year that would work best for you, then choose several dates in that period that work both for you and your guests. Venues tend to book really fast and sometimes a full year in advance, which is why having multiple dates set gives you more space to get the venue you want. Which leads us to the next item.
Book a Venue
The availability of the venue is what ultimately determines your wedding date. If you have a special date in mind you would love to hold your wedding at, you need to start looking for an available venue as soon as possible, ideally a year before the wedding or right after your engagement.
Some popular venues tend to be booked even more than a year in advance, so you should prioritize this as much as you can.
The Guest List
Ideally, you should start working on your guest list at the same time you start searching for a venue. You need to at least have a general idea of how many people you’re going to invite so you can determine if the venue you like has the capacity for everyone you want to be there.
The guest list will also affect your budget, so you can estimate how much you are going to have to pay per person and if that fits your budget (and the venue’s pricing). However, keep in mind that guest count tends to get down as the wedding date draws near, so plan for that as well.
Book the Transportation
If you want to arrive at your wedding in style, the only right way to do it is to book a reliable limo service. You want to do this after you’ve picked the venue, as limo services also tend to be booked in advance. Most of these companies don’t have large fleets, so you either might end up with a model other than the one you wanted or without a limo at all.
