Jen and I really wanted to ensure that we still had a great wedding without blowing our budget.  We had a few ideas on where to save some money, but our wedding planner book gave us so many more ideas on where to cut costs without cutting down on quality.  That last point is very important as you certainly don’t want to cut corners on your wedding day by using inferior or tatty second hand items.

You can pay a small fortune on a wedding planner consultant, but we really didn’t think they could provide very good value for money when you can do the wedding planning yourself (with the help of a wedding book planner).

So where are some of the areas you can blow your wedding budget?

• While a wedding dress and bridal wear might well be a beautiful piece of clothing, the difference between amount it costs to make and the amount it sells for in a wedding shop is outrageous.  There are plenty of ways of still getting a great wedding dress without spending a small fortune.  A couple of tips we discovered were to shop around.  A speciality wedding shop is always going to charge a premium.  Quite often, you can find a suitable wedding dress in a department store.  Also, the second hand market for wedding dresses is really worth following up as they are the fraction of the price of new wedding dresses and in most cases they are in almost new condition.

• Catering is the main area where wedding budgets can totally get shot.  If you plan on keeping your wedding budget in shape, you need to keep a tight handle on catering, from reception hall, food and drinks.  You’ll find that quotes for wedding catering will vary hugely and it can often be hard to directly compare each quote.  There’s was a whole bunch of advice and tips in our wedding planner book that we used to cut our initial catering budget by at least 50%.

• Wedding Photographer.  Obviously you want great photos and video of your wedding, so don’t go trusting those precious wedding memories to one of your friends (unless they are already a professional photographer).  You might be amazed at just how much some wedding photographers can charge.   You also have to be very careful about what’s included in the price.  Some wedding photographers charge extra for travel time and one of the biggest additional costs is charging extra for the prints as a lot of wedding photographers don’t let you have a copy of the images on DVD without paying a small ransom.

That’s just a small number of things to take into consideration when you are planning your wedding on a budget.  Jen and I set ourselves a strict wedding budget of $5000, which we managed to stick with using a lot of the tips from our wedding planner book and we felt like we had a fantastic wedding due to not breaking the bank and sticking to a good wedding plan.

There are so many things to consider and coordinate to plan for the perfect wedding.  We had no real idea apart from some vague notions on venue and theme.   We found a really good wedding planner book to help us cover all the bases and ensure we didn’t forget anything.

Here’s a few wedding plan tips that we found were important to us:

• Plan ahead as far as possible.  Even if your wedding date is 6 or even 12 months down the track, there are many things that get booked out a long way ahead.  For example, the church or wedding venue, reception hall, entertainment etc.
• Consider the season.  Most people don’t choose to get married in winter (if you live in a very cold area) or in the middle of summer (if you live in a very hot area) for obvious reasons.  However, if you don’t have a choice in the matter, make sure you take into account things like venues, clothing, and food that are appropriate for the season.
• For the bridesmaid dresses, you can save a lot of money by either hiring the dresses (most bridal places offer this service) or if you are going to buy the dresses, check out one of the main department stores like Sears, as they will generally have a great range of glamorous dresses suitable for all occasions and for a fraction of the price you’d pay in a boutique bridal salon.
• To be able to stick within your wedding budget, you need to keep track of all your expenses and quotes.  You’ll find there is a huge range in quotes for similar wedding products and services, so make sure you shop around.  One big tip we discovered was to not be too forthcoming with that you are getting married.  We found that some places will charge a premium once they know they are dealing with a wedding, so unless they specifically ask, just keep it quiet.  You may surprise yourself as to how much you can save.
• Keep the wedding theme in mind when booking venues and planning designs and decorations.  For example, if you are going for a traditional wedding, you don’t really want a night club atmosphere at the reception venue and you don’t want the bridesmaids to be dressed in different styles and colors.
• Make sure you meet all the people (eg: priest/marriage celebrant, photographer etc)  involved in the wedding beforehand, so that you are clear what their plans are and you can convey any particular details you want to include.
• While there is specific wedding organizer software available to track things like invitations and gift register, we found it was easy enough to just use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of things.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to planning a wedding, so I think you can see how important it is to be organized well ahead of time.

There are just so many things involved with planning a wedding that we hadn’t considered. Things like:

• Venues and available dates
• Wedding announcements
• Wedding theme
• Whether to get married by a priest or marriage celebrant
• Budgets (this is a big one)
• Choosing best man and bridesmaids
• Flowers
• Wedding photographer
• Limousine  hire – most brides want to arrive to their wedding in style
• Number of wedding guests (can be hard determining the optimal number)
• Reception venue
• Reception dinner, drinks and entertainment.
• Seating arrangements.

and the list seemed to go on and on.  Clearly planning a wedding wasn’t quite as straight forward as we imagined.

At that point it seemed clear that we needed some type of wedding planning guide to ensure that we were going to manage to organise everything smoothly as possible.

We checked out a few of the wedding checklists and wedding organizers that we found and while they offered some help, they were all a bit light on in detail and didn’t cover all aspects of a wedding.

That’s when we decided to look around for some wedding planner books to see if they were much better.  Luckily we found one particular wedding planner book that we thought was great and it really helped us big time.