https://www.listennotes.com/e/db76531881ba4e9a827ec94b423b0cb0

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. What is the best way to find vendors for an area you're not familiar with? Ha ha. Okay. Love this question. This is fantastic. Facebook groups and preferred vendors. Okay, so I am obsessed with Facebook groups. You guys had better be in ours. Cause it's the best. Okay. And it's a budget wedding planning group, like nationwide. If not, we might have a couple of international people there as well. So they could be a really good resource of. Hey, I'm looking for a photographer in this area. Here's my budget. This is why I like Facebook groups. And I will always talk about them till I'm blue in the face. You can put, I would like a photographer for eight hours with a second shooter at this location for $2,500. Anybody have somebody. And there are oftentimes vendors in that group that go, I can do everything you just asked for. It's like a reverse Google. You. Well, not like a reverse Google. When you Google something like that, you then have to go to their website, hope they have the pricing available, set up a phone call, go meet with them. There's a lot of different steps that you have to take just to find out if you can even afford them. With a Facebook group, you can go in there and say, here is my list of things that I would like to have from this particular vendor. Anybody? Anybody? Got it. Anyone want to do this? Great. So that's a fantastic place to start. And. Or preferred vendors. Let's say you find a wedding coordinator, which I do highly recommend if you are working out of town from where your wedding is. Finding someone there to help you coordinate is very, very helpful. Again, I know a lot of us who are here in the master plan can't afford to hire a coordinator. But let's say you find a photographer you really jive with, or let's say you really jive with your venue coordinator or the person who's running the venue and say, hey, do you happen to have any preferred vendors? And start there. Because if you. I often find that we ended up kind of coming up with this dream team of back when I was working way, way, way More Weddings, this dream team of vendors that we work with over and over again because they all kind of sit fit into the same price point. We all liked working with each other. Everyone had great personalities. We meshed really well. And those were the people on my preferred vendors list. Because if I get to pick my co workers, I'm going to pick ones that have a great price and a great personality. So that would be a good idea to go to your venue or to go to your photographer and be like, hey, who do you recommend? Like, just generally speaking, who do you like working with who kind of, you know, fits in the price range that I might be in? Of course, they might not know all of the costs like a wedding planner would or wedding coordinator, but that is a great place to start, especially when you're starting from complete scratch. What the overarching theme here is more word of mouth, right? We want to look more for someone who's had direct experience with them or the vendor themselves. So you're not googling and trying to find it all. What is the most common red flag or problem you see written into vendor contracts? I don't see a lot of common red flags or problems written into contracts. I don't think that's. But that's a perspective thing because I don't think contracts are scary. Contracts are scary if you don't read them or if you don't understand them. But when you take a look at them, everything is pretty much normal. Par for the course. I very rarely have something pop out at me that I'm like, oh, that's not good. In fact, I can't remember the last time that happened. I had one scenario, and I love this reference because I thought it was so silly, where the photographer in her contract required that the wedding planner bring her a meal. So I emailed the photographer and I was like, some of that like. Or I think I talked to her about the day. No, I talked to her on the day of. And I was like, so bringing you food. She's like, listen, this was for an event where they refused to feed me. So I said, I put that in my contract. And I was like, okay, well, can I just make it, like, space for you to go get your food, or do you want me to actually deliver it to you? She goes, oh, no, no, I'll go get it myself. So as far as red flags are concerned, it's more people not taking the time to read them. There's a joke in the industry that those who read contracts are lawyers and everybody else doesn't. So if you don't know what you're signing, that's the red flag. Which kind of maybe doesn't help in this situation, but usually there isn't much to be concerned about.

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@wolferenco.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 wedding priorities dot com. Okay. Stressing out over catering. We're doing buffet style, and we're having trouble finding a caterer that falls in our $40 per person budget. Our. Our day of coordinator said she could do a grazing table and dessert table for us, which saves us a bit. But our date is August, August 3, 2024, and we haven't booked dinner. Okay. At that price point, you will struggle to find a full service caterer. That can do something like this. Here's what I would recommend. This is one of my favorite hacks. Get servers, rent chafing dishes and order drop catering. So drop catering you can get from anywhere. You can get it from Chipotle, you can get it from your local Italian restaurant. It's literally where they just prepare a bunch of food and drop it off or someone goes to pick it up. You also have TaskRabbit to go pick it up for you on your behalf. And that way you're not paying for a full catering service, you're still getting incredible food and you're keeping your cost per person down. So you can have servers to serve the food and to bus your tables and to set everything up for you, but you're cutting out the cost of the high end catering by doing an option like this. Let me know if that's something that's interesting or sounds interesting to you because I would love to chat further if you have more detailed questions. But drop catering is such a good option and it's very easy to find servers. Often it's bartending companies will have both bartenders and servers available. Last I checked, in my area it's like $35 per server per hour. And then they have like a four hour minimum that they need to work, which is again perfect for a scenario like this. 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.