Online Wedding Planning Guide

Even if you hire a wedding planner, don’t hand over the reigns to your wedding too early on. Not if you want to achieve the wedding of your dreams.

But as you’re getting down to the week or so before your wedding, the balance between the importance of planning your dream wedding and the importance of living your dream wedding will shift. It’s time to stop with the planning and start with the living.

However the planning won’t actually be finished a week or two before your wedding. Some of the most important things you have to do to make sure you get the wedding of YOUR dreams, to stop others from taking it over, have to be done right before your wedding. In fact, many of them have to be done the day before or the day of your wedding. But, repeat after me:

"I don’t want to be planning my wedding on my wedding day."

You want to be living your wedding on the day of your wedding. And if you can manage to start living your wedding several days or even a couple weeks before your wedding, even better.

The keys to being able to hand over the reigns in the right way and at the right time, will be described in my posts about Double-checking/Delegating and The Last Word (I’ll put live links here once those posts are written).

The keys come down to (a) being prepared to turn the reigns over to someone else and still get what you want and (b) handing the reigns over to the right person.

One excellent reason to hire a wedding planner is if you don’t know the right kind of people in your personal life to do (b).

You probably didn’t pick your friends (and you don’t even get to pick your family) based on how well they’ll take charge and follow your wedding-creation plans. (If that is how you chose your friends, well . . . that’s going to work out really well for the advice on this site, but immediately following your wedding, I’m going to have to recommend some counseling. ).

If you ended up with a lot of unreliable or free-spirited or wimpy friends and family, you’ll need to hire someone to hand the reigns off to. It’s critical to be able to hand off the reigns and live your wedding day!

Throughout all of this, the most important thing to keep in mind is you. Well, you and your beloved. Figure out what you want and then make it happen. This site takes you through both parts of that process. First the process of figuring out what you want (within the constraints of reality, a budget, the family you were cursed blessed with, how much time you’ve got until the wedding, etc.).

First step (and next topic on this site), figure out what you want. Have fun!

Tags: 1. Introduction by Debbie
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To have the most flexibility, you should start your wedding planning anywhere from a year to eighteen months before you’d like to actually get married.

Wait! Don’t panic! People have successfully pulled together weddings that were just perfect for them with a few weeks or even a few days of planning.

The 12-18 month suggestion is just that, a suggestion.

It is, however, based on the wise idea that spreading the tasks out over time will cause you less stress. A longer timetable also allows for those chunks of time when you’re lying on your couch thinking, "Wedding? I could not care less if I had a wedding!" and, believe me, those times will arise, times when you’ll just want to put all the planning aside and think about something (anything) else for a while!

But, for those who find the last minute approach preferable (or necessary), timetables can be completely ignored.

I was very proud of myself for pulling the whole thing off in less than 15 minutes for under $100. – Lisa

If you’re planning your wedding under a tight timeline, controlling your own brain is one of the most important things you can do. Let me repeat: don’t panic. If you panic, you’ll not only make yourself miserable on the day of the panic, you’ll make yourself more likely to ruin your wedding.

Even if you’re working under a tight timeline, plan in rest periods. You’ll have to make them shorter than you might have liked them to be if you had more time, but you still need them.

You need to take a couple days (or at least a few hours) here or there where you don’t work on your wedding. And I don’t mean the time you spend working on your job or cleaning your house or going to school or taking care of children or whatever. I mean you need time OFF. Spend this time just having fun with your beloved and remembering why you wanted to marry him in the first place. Or spend the time by yourself, resting and doing things you enjoy (other than wedding planning).

When you’re working on your wedding, work on it, concentrate and move forward. When you’re not working on it (and make sure there are times when you’re not working on it), put it from your mind and remember that your wedding is but one day in the wonderful life you have ahead. Don’t screw up the life just to have the wedding.

Tags: 1. Introduction by Debbie
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This is the key. Do you want the wedding of YOUR dreams? Or are you relatively happy if you get half the wedding that you want and half the wedding that other people think you should want?

If it’s the latter, well, okay then. You can use this book to keep you from feeling overwhelmed (by eating the elephant a bite at a time) and to help you know what questions to ask specific vendors.

The rest of the site, you won’t need. Because other people are more than willing to take over your wedding if you let them. You don’t have to put any attention or effort into getting people to bully you around to creating the wedding of their dreams.

It’s a little more effort (although about 90% of it is purely psychological effort on your part) to be sure that you get the wedding of YOUR dreams.

The Controllers

There are essentially two types of people who will try to take over your wedding, preventing the wedding of YOUR dreams. They are:

• Family members (including soon-to-be in-laws)
• Vendors

As you might think, handling these two types of "controllers" takes rather different approaches. Vendors are with you just for this wedding. Family you have to live with for the rest of your life!

You’ll find the topic of talking to family members (along with lots of other information) covered in this online wedding planning guide.

A third possible type of controller is a combination of the other two:

• friends or family who are providing services for your wedding.

This can be a little trickier, because you’re both dealing with them as a vendor and planning to have a relationship with them for the rest of your life. This requires a balance of the strategies used with family members and the strategies used with vendors.

You’ll need to think about these different strategies to find the right balance between treating a particular person as a vendor who is a friend/family member vs. a friend/family member who is doing you a favor by providing something you’d normally get from a vendor.

Tags: 1. Introduction by Debbie
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Have you ever heard about how to eat an elephant? The answer is "One bite at a time." It’s the same with planning something as elephant-sized as your wedding.

Even if your wedding is going to be relatively small in terms of the number of guests you’ll invite or the number of vendors you’ll hire, planning a wedding is still an elephant. There are still many, many decisions that you have to make, and there are usually many other people (your beloved, your family and friends, and your vendors) with whom you must play nicely (but "firmly") .

One of the secrets to planning the wedding you’ve always wanted is to take it step-by-step and not worry about everything all at once.

To take a bite-by-bite approach to planning your wedding, you’ll find that this online wedding planning guide is an invaluable tool. Each category of this site presents an aspect of wedding planning and some suggestions on how you can best approach it.

The categories are organized such that you’ll make decisions about your wedding in the easiest order. No longer do you have to look at your list of 12,000 things to be accomplished and not know where to start. This online wedding planning guide tells you where to start. Then it tells you how to get from Step A to Step B and from B to C and so on. Work through the exercises on this site one by one, and you’ll find yourself planning the wedding you really want.

Tags: 1. Introduction by Debbie
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