4 things to consider before planning your destination wedding
Ok so you’ve met the guy of your dreams that you’re ready to spend the rest of your life with and he has proposed! The moment you have been planning for since childhood is finally here….. now what?! I know as a little girl I had all these ideas of the dress, the colors, the location and I literally stuck with none of it! The dress style I had in mind didn’t quite look the way I thought it would on my body type and the colors I wanted weren’t my faves anymore! So I basically had to start my planning from scratch. In order to effectively plan and not waste money on unnecessary odds and ends I needed structure!
The first thing I did was purchased a binder (that eventually turned into more of a scrapbook box for future reference). I needed a place to keep my receipts, login information, inspirations and anything else I wanted to look back on in the years to come. In the very beginning, inside this binder, I had a template to keep track of spending that really came in handy, a checklist with the timetable of when certain things needed to be done and a potential guest list! I needed something tangible to keep track of EVERYTHING I may have needed during that year of planning.
The second thing I did was sat down with my fiancé and decided on a budget! I know ideally, the b word wouldn’t exist but we were in our mid 20’s with a 1 year old, we couldn’t splurge like we were celebrities! Coming together to discuss our costs (which we ended up going over) helped us to realize that we had two totally different ideas of how much a wedding should cost! He was more conservative and wanted to keep our spending to a limit, whereas I wanted the fairytale wedding that I had always dreamed of. So it’s always best to sit with your partner and figure out if you’re on the same page or if you have to change some ideas around before the planning process begins.
The third thing I had to decide was if I needed a wedding planner or could I do it on my own! Looking back on it, I could have saved myself a ton of stress by passing the responsibility off to a planner but I regretfully, I did not! There were so many little details that I did not account for prior to taking on the job of planning my own wedding, but did I learn. Of course you want everything to go as smooth as possible but me being new to planning, I made several rookie mistakes that could have been avoided if I had hired someone in the beginning. Deciding if you are going to hand over some of that responsibility to someone that knows about the wedding industry is a decision that should be made very early on!
The last thing we needed to do was decide on a place, not as in a venue just yet but at least a city! Destination weddings are beautiful and relatively less expensive than getting married in the city. There are some cons to having a wedding away from home such as everyone may not be able to make it (which could actually be a pro depending on how you look at it). But weighing out what details about your weeding day matter more will help to decide where to go.
All in all the process of preparing for your wedding day, no matter how stressful, is a memorable time! Need help removing the stress? Schedule a free consultation with me so that we can discuss all of the ways I can help you plan your dream wedding! You can either email me at [email protected] or by visiting my website at https://linktr.ee/Wannageaux