Ask The Experts: Early Decisions To Make About Your Wedding

Planning a wedding can be hard and sometimes stressful! After all most people have never done it before, so today I am here to offer you some words of wedding planning wisdom. When you start to plan your wedding, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. That’s why it’s wise to have some sort of plan in place, so you know what needs planning and when. This will make the whole process a lot easier, smoother and ultimately quicker.
So what are some of the earliest decisions you might want to get out of the way? Let’s take a look.

Wedding Planning Decisions You Need to Make First

photo by Nicola Thompson – full wedding here

The Date

This might be the very first thing, because you need to do everything else around this, and you also need to give your guests as much Save the Date warning as you possibly can. Once you know your date and you have it set in stone, you can then move on to planning and booking everything else, but without it, it is all just a theory. So think carefully about the date, make sure there are no huge clashes, and consider the weather in your area too. These are factors you won’t want to overlook.

Photo by Tiptoe with eve – full wedding here

The Budget

Before you go any further you really need to think about how much money you have to spend on the wedding. Have you already got some savings? Or are you going to need to save to host your dream day? Will your family be helping out financially? If so how much? All these financial questions need to be considered before you go looking at venues and suppliers, as you need to know how much you can spend. There is no point looking at big expensive venues if your budget is more suited to a village hall or hosting the wedding at home. Remember, the biggest expense is going to come from your guests, i.e the size of the venue to put them in and the food to feed them with, so keeping your guest count down can really help with your cash flow.

photos by Amor Amor Weddings – full wedding here

The Venue

At the same time as that, you need to be thinking about the venue, because of course it has to be somewhere that is available on your preferred date. So in truth, the date and the venue are to be considered together and as one. There are other considerations for the venue too, such as whether it is large enough to hold your numbers and whether they offer a service of helping with decorations, or whether you are literally just booking a space. It’s all stuff you need to think about as early as you can.

photo by Ashley Griffin Photography – full wedding here 

The Guest List

This also goes hand in hand with the venue. You need to have a rough idea of how many people you want to invite so you know how big a venue you need to book. Are you looking for something intimate or a micro wedding? If so then a much smaller venue will be needed. Or are you looking to invite all of your friends and family? If so then you may want to look at a venue with an added marquee or somewhere that holds 100’s of people.

Photo by  Briana Nolan  – full wedding here 

Photographer

You’ll want your wedding to be well remembered, and one of the main ways to make sure of that is to have a photographer on the day. They do however get booked up incredibly quickly, so you will need to make sure that you are booking yours in as soon as possible. You might also want to consider having a wedding videographer, which can be a little different and can help ensure that it will be even more memorable than usual. That is the kind of thing that you are certainly going to want to think about here, so it’s something to consider.

photo by Juliana Noelle Jumper – full wedding here

Basic Theme

You’ll need at least a basic theme in place, because that is going to be used on your Save the Date cards as well as your invites, and because everything else will need to fit within that theme too. So make sure that you are thinking about this, and you do so carefully. It’s something that is going to prove really important and which you need to make sure you are both happy with. It can be helpful to think about something in your relationship that you would like to be remembered and included here.

photo by Laura Calderwood Photography – full wedding here 

There are many other things to consider when planning your wedding, BUT these are the very first things you need to think about to make the wedding planning easier. If you do these things first and foremost the next few months of wedding planning will be a lot less stressful. 

this is a collaborative post