Online Wedding Planning Guide

You’ve gotten a few wedding planning things under your belt at this point: (1) you’ve agreed to get married and (2) you’ve identified the things about the wedding that are most important to you. Those are big steps. Now, take a deep breath, because this next step is where the wedding planning rubber meets the road.

You have to figure out how much money you’ll have to spend on your wedding. This is where you decide what you’re willing to "pay" (and I don’t just mean financially) to get the things you’ve realized are important to you as you plan for your wedding day.

Imagining a fairy tale wedding with all the trimmings is free. Making it actually happen is going to cost you. You can pay for things with money, hard work, barter, or a piece of your soul (if, for example, you must swap a piece of it for financial help from your mother).

To help us save even more money, we called on friends and family with particular skills to provide other aspects of the wedding and reception. A friend of ours owned a restaurant and he offered to purchase all the food we needed from his wholesale distributors, and he offered us his kitchen for all the preparations. Another friend who is a Lutheran chaplain offered to purchase our flowers with her wholesale flower card. She also offered to create our bouquets, boutonnieres, and centerpieces. Getting the flowers wholesale and not having to pay a florist saved us a considerable amount of money. A third friend, who is a jeweler, designed and created our wedding bands. We got rings we both like at a discounted rate. Two people from my mother-in-law’s church offered to set up and maintain the buffet during the reception. This saved us from having to hire catering staff to manage that aspect of the reception.— Paula

Paying With Time (”Do It Yourself”)

How much time do you want to spend making your own decorations or invitations? Do you have the skills to do that kind of thing without accidentally chopping off an appendage? Do you know people with the kinds of skills a wedding requires (catering, photography, flower arranging, etc.)? Are you going to be able to get the service and quality you want from these friends?

There are plenty of good books on the market about saving money at your wedding. I read several and certainly know the one I couldn’t live without, but every bride’s situation is different, and most books include some good advice.

I followed or modified a few suggestions from other books, for my own wedding, despite the fact that all my friends, every member of my family, my fiancé, and I are all basically without useful skills (there’s very little call for physical therapy or technical writing/editing at a wedding).

Pay By Debt

You can also pay for your wedding with money you get from outside sources, such as parents, in-laws, and bank loans. Those choices come with a different set of costs. Is the wedding important enough that you’re willing to spend several years paying it off? If your parents or in-laws contribute money, will they expect you to plan certain parts of your wedding the way they want you to (the probable answer to that is "yes")? Are you fine with that?

Once again, these are all questions to which there is no right answer. Only you know what you want and what you’re willing to pay to get it. And if you don’t know, then this is when you need to find out. You and your fiancé must talk about how you’d like to see the wedding paid for.

Since my husband and I had no money at the time and my parents had no money to contribute, the entire wedding was financed by my in-laws. I now feel I took the easy way out, by letting them take control – and foot the bill – I missed out a bit on having the wedding be a more comfortable celebration for me and my husband. – Betsy

Prepare to Talk

In the next post, we’ll review your online wedding planning guide homework exercise: talking to your belove about M.O.N.E.Y., including possible topics for The Talk. You might even provide your beloved with that list ahead of time, so he’ll know what topics to expect. . . . Or you might not.

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Tags: 3. Money Talks //