Home & Family Facts and Notes

If you’re getting married, some people will tell you that you’re going to have to hire a wedding planner. True, a wedding planner can take a lot of stress away by handling all of the little details of your special day, but they’re expensive and, if you’re not paying attention, the wedding will be more a product of his or her imagination than yours.

Alternatively if you decide to do the preparation on your own, you have to devise a way of checking each detail, who you will assign to do each task and if it was already done. An excellent wedding planner book could be your best reference for this as it could give you an overall picture of a preferred design and help you envision how everything will finally look. It will lead you through choices of flowers, souvenirs and other minute details which might otherwise escape you altogether.

Generally, the wedding planning book will begin with choices of preferred general images. It could be beach wedding or a garden wedding on a beautiful spring day. Maybe you would opt for the traditional wedding in a church or a cathedral. Or do you want to celebrate it with a bang on New Year’s Day or have a sweet wedding on a Valentine’s Day. As soon as you know what overall look of the wedding you want, then you can go into the more specific process of organizing your wedding. Of course, before you can decide on anything, you must already know how much money you have earmarked for this joyous occasion.

One of the first things you should do is set a budget, which most wedding planner books do a great job of helping out with. Most will give you a budget sheet with a suggested breakdown of the costs, suggesting percentages of the total budget to be spent on flowers, your photographer, the groom’s dinner, etc. Of course, to plan out how the budget should be allocated you need to figure out how much you can afford to spend for the wedding, as weddings can cost from $1,000 to $100,000. How much you decide to spend is completely up to you, though it will have an effect on how many guests you can invite and where you spend your money.

Once you have a budget, your wedding planner book should walk you through the process of finding locations for a ceremony and a reception, picking out a dress, picking out flowers, finding a photographer, and putting together all of the rest of the components of your wedding. Though a wedding planner book may not be quite as comprehensive as an actual wedding planner, a good book will walk you through the whole process and make sure you don’t forget anything along the way.

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