Planning a wedding is exciting and stressful at the same time. There’s a lot to plan, a lot of money to spend, and a lot of decisions to make. If the planning is more stressful than fun, there are things that you can do to make it less more exciting.
Get Organized
The best way to beat the stress is to have as organised an approach as possible. There’s lots of apps for wedding planning, which will help you to know what should be booked or decided when. Keep an organised list, or spreadsheet, for everything you’ve spent, deposits that have been paid, and when final payments are due. This will help you track your budget, and make sure everything is paid for on time.
Be Selective About Advice
Everyone will have thoughts on your wedding. Everyone from your mother to the woman who does your nails will have some advice for you. All that advice can get overwhelming, especially if it’s conflicting or doesn’t sound like what you want. Be selective about who you listen to. Some advice will be useful, such as tips from married friends about the Wedding Assistant website they used for suppliers. Other advice will be less helpful, like your well-meaning hairdresser, who tells you that you couldn’t possibly wear pink shoes on your wedding day. Learn to tune out the rest, and politely ignore it.
Plan Together
It’s easy for the bride to get hit with the majority of the wedding planning. Try not to do this. Not only does this put more pressure on you, but it also pushes your partner out of the planning. Plan the wedding together, share the workload and stress, you both feel involved, and you’ll be spending time together at the same time. Try to make the planning fun where you can. Enjoy the fun parts, like menu tasting, and celebrate ticking the less fun parts off the list, like opening champagne when you’ve finished addressing all your invitations!
Give Yourself Time
The earlier you start, the less stressed you will be. Start early. Book your venue well in advance, and then you’ll have more time to think about the rest, with no panic as the date gets closely and you still haven’t found someone to make the cake.
Take your time over choosing things, and you’ll still have time for other things too. Couples who don’t give themselves much time to plan get stressed as the whole world becomes wedding, and there’s no time for anything else. Start at least a year before you plan to get married.
The other advantage of starting early means you can spread your costs out more, have more time to save, have more choice before everything books up, and might get access to last year’s prices, allowing you to save money.
