How Far In Advance Can You Plan Your Wedding | Wedding Q&A

Well, hello lovely humans and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Wolfer and I truly believe that wedding planning does not need to be complicated or time consuming. I kind of picture these episodes like jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner. You get your answers and you go on your merry way. Because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today's episode is going to admittedly be a little bit all over the place. You see, every single month I sit down with the people over in the master plan course and answer your questions in Lifetime. So if you find yourself struggling and really need to sit down and speak with a real life wedding planner, I would love to be a part of your wedding planning journey. Join us over in the master plan today to get your questions answered. Until then, take a listen. Do I have to follow booking timelines? I'm a funeral director. Oh, very fast paced planning. So I'm wanting to get things booked out as fast as I can. Is that a smart move or should I wait and follow what is more routine? The only time I really want to emphasize the importance of a planning timeline is I don't want people taking too long. I don't want them thinking I got time, I got time. And then they get themselves into a position where they don't got time or they get into a place where they don't have the flexibility or the freedom to make as many of the decisions that they would have had they given themselves more time to research, to look into different vendors, to see different costs, et cetera. So as far as planning fast, I rarely see a big issue with it. I just want to make sure that you are equipped enough to make empowered decisions and not feeling like you have to just plan, plan, plan and you're just booking whomever you find. So as long as you feel confident in whom you're choosing, I'm not too fussed about it. The only thing that I, in addition to that, that I would be cautious of is asking your wedding party. Cause a lot can happen in a year. So if you are three years away from your wedding, don't ask people right now to be in your wedding party. Just as a gentle aside. Because sometimes life changes and experiences change. So usually you ask about six months to a year in advance for that. Sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to and you may be sitting there going, you know what, Jamie? Actually, yeah, that. That makes a lot of sense. I would love to be able to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the master plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much? You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the master plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out@wolferandco.com tmp that's wolferandco.com tmp Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all. And I think it's important to make sure that you're budgeting according to your priorities. Build a budget that works with your vision and you'll be on the path to planning a wedding that you really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to weddingpriorities.com what do brides typically find to be a priority and a must have during the planning process, but later regret or find that they cared about least when their big day actually came? There is not a one singular thing. There isn't. It's not like, oh, this one vendor everybody regrets. No, like, I've never had anyone regret hiring a videographer ever. Unless, you know, maybe they hired one that wasn't nice or I'm not entirely sure. I've just never had that happen. I feel like the biggest regret that brides might have that they prioritize would be the opinions of others and how that influences their colors. Who they invite, what they rent, the vendors they book, how the evening goes, what cultural things get added in and or removed and later on find themselves sad about that. Sad that they allowed an outside influence to speak so strongly into them. I know my husband's biggest regret from our wedding was not inviting more kids. We had to limit the budget. We got married for less than ten grand. And he was like, I guess we just can't invite some kids. We got to cut somewhere, right? And later on he was like, I think, I think I would have preferred to have more kids there. So it is not universal. It's not across the board. I do have a couple videos on regrets if you would like to take a peek at those. But really what I want you to do, and the whole point of tonight's call is we're talking about prioritizing the actual planning timeline. I want you to sit down with your fiance and come up with what your priorities are. I don't want you to come up with external priorities. That's why the very first thing you do in the master plan is to sit down and go, okay, what's most important to you? Okay, here's what's most important to me. And notice that's not a conversation with your mom. Notice it's not a conversation with your best friend or with your grandma or with your entire wedding party. That's just you and your fiance sitting there going, let's figure out how we want to do this. And because what you each pick is your top three for your priorities is where you can spend your time and your money, the most of it. That that doesn't mean that if you know the, the bar doesn't make the top three for either of your lists, that doesn't mean that you're not going to have one. You're just not going to focus on finding the best vendor or spending the most time finding the best price point, but also includes all the amenities that you want. I want to make sure that you guys, when, when you are planning that you don't skip that step. Because so many times what I hear is the regrets come from not having priorities set up to begin with because you think you know what you want from a wedding and then you get in there and you're like, oh snap, I don't, I have no clue. Or oh shoot, I have to book all of these things. Which is so not the case. Which is why I, that's a non negotiable first step for me. Sit down, talk about priorities. If you do that worksheet where you like go through a number of like a speed test, I do highly recommend doing that because there's things on there that you might be like, I don't know what this is good, skip it. You probably don't need it if you're not married to. It doesn't matter, just move on. Just keep moving. It's going to be okay. So instead of trying to figure out what the regrets are and avoiding those, I would say that it's far greater to figure out what your priorities are and invest in those. Having a very budget, friendly and DIY heavy wedding in which all each's Grooms and brides party members will need a task in collecting food slash coffee for the suites. Suites as in hotel suites. Ceremony reception, set up and breakdown, moving boxes and gifts. Any ideas on how to best delegate these kinds of jobs for six grooms people, three men. Three men and eight bridesmaids. Okay, so basically we're having like a whole lot of people diy. I do have a video. A whole lot of people set up the diy. I do have a whole video on how to delegate wedding tasks. I think that you should have one point person. I think this will go a lot more smoothly if one person knows the entire innards of your brain of what you want with this. I think that you should be overly detailed when it comes to this. Not like paragraph explanations. But I think everything needs to be labeled. I think there's a video as well, Rebecca, on where I talked about how to organize your DIYs. That is huge. If you want people to help you with setup with tear down, give them explicit instructions and make it Barney style. Like I want. I want it to be written like a purple dinosaur is explaining to a five year old where this is supposed to go. Also with a five year old's attention span. You feel what I'm saying here? So it's like if you have all like a single centerpiece in one box where it's got all the components that go on one table and they could just plunk it down and take all those things off. In addition to that, if you could have a photo of what you want it to look like on the outside of the box so then you don't have to worry about someone having an artistic eye putting it together. You've made it very, very simple. I would also try to think through, you know, their driving places and setting up stuff and hotel suites, collecting food, etc. Yeah, I would, I would almost think that you would need to treat this as if you are the wedding planner giving out these instructions and giving out these assignments. Yep. Okay. Oh, perfect. Yeah, it's the how to organize your wedding decor. That would be a glorious one to drop in there. Thank you so much. So the more organized you are, the less your family and friends are going to be stressed out and the easier it's going to go for all of you. So I highly recommend go look through those. Have a list mark on the items where they're supposed to go. Maybe have a map of the venue where things are supposed to go. Again, we're not overly complicating this. We're just trying to be explicitly clear. So we don't need paragraphs, we need bullet points. We just need quick, quick, give it. Give the information to them real fast. If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the master plan community over@themasterplanwed.com I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a five star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time. Bye guys.