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Everything you need to know to get started planning your wedding. Lay the foundation for your wedding planning by defining your vision, identifying priorities, and setting a realistic wedding budget. 


So you’re just recently engaged and wondering where to start with your wedding planning. This page will walk you through the steps of laying the foundation for your wedding plans so you can put together an event you love on a budget you can actually afford! 

Before you get started

So, you’re engaged! Yay, congrats! Take some time to celebrate your engagement and soak in this moment. Your engagement period is a small fraction of your time together as a couple so use this time wisely. 

The wedding day is not the finish line, it’s the starting line of a life-long marathon together. Make sure that you and your partner are fully prepared and compatible in the long term by taking some intentional time to examine all the different aspects of your relationship.

Important Conversations Pre-Wedding Planning

Many couples don’t think to have these conversations until they go through pre-marital counseling. Before you get started planning your wedding, make sure you’ve had these important conversations.

Lifestyle Conversations

You want to make sure your values and life goals are in alignment with your partner’s. Have you ever taken the time to dive deep into what you both want out of life? Some good points for discussion:

  • What are your personal values?
  • What type of lifestyle do you want to live?
  • Where do you want to live location-wise?
  • Are you actively working towards the life you want to live?
  • Do you want to have children? How will you raise them?
  • Have you discussed your faith or belief systems and their role in your lives?

Money Conversations

Let me get real with you for a sec. Marriage is hard, and money is a big factor and a potential source of stress. Before you head down the aisle, you must ensure you have your money situation in check. 

  • Have you discussed your personal finances? 
  • Do you have debt?
  • Do you each have an emergency fund set up?
  • If either of your families needed help and support, whether financially or physically, would you be willing to do that?

Remember, the Wedding Ceremony = getting married, Wedding Reception = Celebration. How you want that celebration to look and feel and how much you want to spend on it is ultimately up to you. 

Another important reminder: Your wedding is just one day. Your marriage is for life. Which are you spending most of your time working on?


Crafting your wedding vision

Before getting started with the nitty-gritty details of planning your day, you’ll want to sit down with your partner and discuss your Big Picture Vision for your wedding.

Consider making this activity more fun and interactive by using our 20 Questions of Wedding Planning free printable game!

Tackle these five important points first because they are the biggest determining factors of your potential cost and will give you an overall framework to build upon.

  • Size – The number of guests you invite to your wedding will have a big impact on the potential cost, so choose wisely. Are you considering a microwedding or a big, epic party?
  • Setting – Indoor, outdoor, or both; winter, spring, summer, fall, ideal venue types, will it be local or destination?
  • Style – Consider your personal style. How would you describe each of your personal styles? Your home style? Get more resources for defining your wedding style here.
  • Vibe – Are you thinking of something upscale or laid-back? Serious and sentimental or off-beat and fun?
  • Timeline – When would you like to get married? How soon do you want to get hitched, and how quickly will you need to plan this celebration?

Savvy Tips:

  • Think about your “why”
  • Consider your personal values
  • Be true to yourselves
  • Define your priorities
  • Have fun with it!

Wedding vision discussion questions:

  1. Why does having a wedding matter to us?
  2. What is our ultimate goal or purpose in having a wedding at all?
  3. How do we want to feel on our wedding day? 
  4. Do we see our ideal wedding as a big, raucous party with everyone we know or an intimate affair with close friends and family only? 
  5. How would we describe our personalities or overall vibes? Are we cosmopolitan chic or laid-back casual? 
  6. Is tradition important to us or to either of our families? Or do we want to go our own way? 
  7. Are there certain elements of the wedding that are of high priority to us? What are we not willing to sacrifice?
  8. What are our biggest financial priorities in the next five years? Are we planning to buy a house, have a baby, start a business, or make other big financial decisions?

Defining your priorities 

When you’re working with a limited budget, you’ll likely have to make sacrifices, but that doesn’t mean your wedding can’t still be awesome! Instead of looking at this list from a negative standpoint, look at it from a place of power. This is your opportunity to weed out everything you’re not interested in including in your day.

Your wedding doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It should reflect who the two of you are as individuals and as a couple. Sit down and decide what’s most important about your wedding day. Need help identifying your top wedding priorities? Consider making a list of all the various items and aspects of a traditional wedding day, and then get liberal with a red pen by marking out what isn’t important to you.

Wedding Priorities Discussion Questions:

  • What aspect of this event is the most important to each of us, individually?
  • What are our top 3 priorities for the wedding celebration? Do they overlap with each other?
  • Is quality or quantity more important?
  • Are we willing to compromise on our priorities to suit our budget?

Recommended Reading:

Setting Your Budget 

If you want to avoid Wedding Debt Regret, you’ll want to set a realistic budget and stay within it. 

Time to crunch the numbers. The amount you choose to spend on your wedding day should be a personal choice based on your own unique set of circumstances and values. Despite what is portrayed in the media, you can absolutely have a beautiful wedding on a budget much smaller than the so-called “averages.”

The many pieces that make up your total wedding budget:

  • Your personal savings
  • Your partner’s personal savings
  • Family contributions
  • Contributions throughout the year

Look at your personal budget and identify areas you can cut back if needed to save more towards the wedding. We also recommend coming up with a drop-dead number or a max budget boundary that you can not or will not go over, no matter what. 

Wedding Budget Discussion Questions:

  1. How much do we currently have in savings?
  2. How much of that are we willing to allocate towards the wedding?
  3. Are there areas in our monthly budget where we could cut back our spending?
  4. What is the maximum amount we are willing to spend on this event?
  5. Can you pick up a side hustle to stash some extra cash?
  6. How will you be paying? Cash, credit, check?
  7. Will you cashflow the wedding or put things on a zero-interest credit card to pay off over time?
  8. Will either of your families be contributing to your wedding funds, or will you be paying for the entire wedding yourselves?
  9. Do you have an emergency fund in place? 
    IE – can you cover at least three months’ worth of living expenses in case of an emergency? If the answer is no, that should be your priority before paying for a wedding.

Creating a wedding savings plan 

If you’re not working with a lump sum of cash to pay for your wedding, you’ll likely want to contribute to your wedding savings fund over the course of your engagement. 

To start, you’ll want to examine your and your partners’ personal monthly budgets to see if there are excess funds to contribute. We love sticking by the 50/30/20 rule, which suggests using 50% of your income towards fixed living expenses, 30% towards flexible personal expenses, and 20% towards financial goals & priorities. 

  • Examine your personal budget
  • Balance your budget accordingly
  • Determine if cut-backs are necessary
  • Calculate your monthly savings goal
  • Automate your savings 

Getting Organized

It’s important to get yourself organized so you can keep track of all your plans in one place. Whether you decide to buy a wedding planning book or download a free wedding planning checklist, you’ll need something to keep yourself on track, on task, and on budget.

Obviously, we have to recommend our book, The Budget-Savvy Wedding Planner & Organizer. It’s sold over 200K copies with nearly 10,000 glowing reviews on Amazon. Check it out for yourself and buy a copy here.

We also hope you will check out our podcast, The Bouquet Toss. We have great tips, tricks, and fun wedding information. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

Creating Your Guest List

One important part of getting started with your wedding planning is to create a rough guest list. Before you begin researching venues and vendors, it’s important to have a rough idea of the size of the event you’re going to have. You should each start by creating a list of all the people you’d like to have present on your big day, including family and friends.  

This doesn’t have to be your final, concrete guest list for your big day, but it’s a great idea to start by making a list of all the people you’d like to have present on your wedding day. This could be your “in a perfect world,” or “if money was no object,” or even your YOLO list. If your funds are tight, you might want to ultimately aim for the “who would I move my date or change my plans for so they could attend” list. 

Guest List Discussion Questions:

  • Who are our wedding VIPs? Aka, the people we’d consider changing our plans for them to attend.
  • Consider your budget divided by your guest count to estimate the cost per head. Does it seem doable or realistic for the event you’re envisioning?
  • Consider a list of rules to abide by to make the cutting process simpler. 
  • Look at your list and determine which single guests will receive a plus 1. 

From there, you should have a rough number of guests you’d love to include at your wedding. Compare the numbers of your VIPs to the YOLO list. These can be your two benchmarks to consider when doing venue research and getting some quotes. 

Recommended Reading:


Moving on to Phase 2 of Wedding Planning

Once you’ve completed all these steps in Phase one, you’re ready to move on to Phase 2: Research & Inspiration!