Wedding Insurance, Two Ceremonies & a Silent Disco: Your Questions Answered! | 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 live time. 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. McKenna said, what should I do about event insurance when we are using an Airbnb that does weddings? They ask specifically for all vendors to have insurance. I'm assuming that means catering, DJ, photography. We are serving beer and wine without a bartender. Is Brightco a good contender for this? We have contracts for the venue, DJ, and working on catering and photography/videography contracts now. Again, a great question. So what you are looking for from your vendors is something that we often shorten to COI, which is also known as certificate of insurance. That is what the venue is requiring from all of your vendors. So you just let them know and they should know what this is. This is very common. Either they will purchase it on a per-event basis, If it's required, or they have year-long coverage, and they will just simply need to send a certificate on over to you or on over to the venue specifically. So you shouldn't— it shouldn't shock any of them that you're asking them for this. If they don't know what it is, they might be a little bit newer to the industry, but just say, yep, our venue requires that you have— that you provide a certificate of insurance. So that's what we're talking about when it comes to all of your vendors. You're not responsible for any sort of coverage for them. You are just making sure that they deliver it, and I'm pretty sure your venue is going to have some sort of stipulation that lists the venue as additional insured. So what their insurance is saying is that it's going to cover the vendor and the venue with the additional insured information. For you specifically, yes, I think Brightco would be a fantastic option for you because they also, especially if you're serving beer and wine without a bartender, you're going to need that host liquor liability license, which all of this sounds super scary. I promise you it's not. With Brightco specifically, they have a little quick quiz that you can take and they will Plinko you into the perfect coverage that you need. That, that's gonna be a great option for you. There are other options if you wanna look into eventhelper.com or wedsafe.com. Those are the ones that we worked with for quite a long time. I've switched over officially to Bryco. We're not even involved in a contract with them anymore, but because of how simple they've made this and how affordable they've made this, they're my favorite. So if you want to do some hunting around, you can look at those other options. And sometimes your home or renter's insurance will offer some sort of liability, but you just want to make sure that they're covering all the things that they need to cover.

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 makes a lot of sense. 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 at 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. I'm getting married September 20th, um, along a lakeshore at a winery in Oregon. Okay. Cool. I am trying to sort out what the procession should look like for my family members. For our ceremony, it will be an hour long. We will first do a 20-minute Vietnamese tea ceremony. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. Where our immediate family will be present. This will be up in the front of our ceremony space in front of our guests. Then I will go have an outfit change before we have our Western ceremony. My question is what the procession should look like for my family, given that they will have already walked down the aisle to attend the tea ceremony. I also— who we have walk down the aisle for the Western ceremony, or should we just treat it as usual? My dad will walk me down. I imagine my 2 brothers would walk my mom down. I'm not sure who else should be involved in this. There are no grandparents. Uh, we also have the bridal party, of course. Let me know what your thoughts are. We oftentimes will customize a procession based on whatever a couple wants, so we will sometimes, if grandparents are present, But they're not mobile enough to make that happen, we will not put them through the process of walking down the aisle because it'll be too much for them. Or we've had some that are mobile but are not quick. Not that they're being timed, it's not a race, but we just know that it would take quite a long time to have that be a part of the processional. So I would say you're probably already— if you're already talking about just mom and dad and family members or siblings, are there additional siblings that we're considering having walk down? You can do anything you want, which I know doesn't give you much structure in response to this. But yes, I do think that as we're kind of talking through this, you want your dad to walk you down and your 2 brothers to walk with your mom. If there are not— if there are no other siblings, then that sounds sufficient to me for the processional. If there are other siblings, they can stay up there and stay seated unless someone has a little bit of an opinion on it, and you're like, okay, fine, then you can come back out and walk back in again. Either way, You can make it work. It's just a matter of, do you have a vision for what you want that to look like? And then when you leave, your family can all leave and come back to be ready to process with you as well for the Western part of the ceremony, should you want to. So it's more of a preference than it is a requirement, or necessarily even a norm that we see in a whole lot of weddings, because we don't really see a giant formal processional like we've seen Historically with grandparents and and whatnot. My fiancé has a traumatic brain injury, has pretty severe noise sensitivity. Because of this, for our 100-person September 2026 wedding, we are having a silent disco. I love everything about this. Do you have any experience with this kind of setup? My biggest concern is that since we are having to pay for the silent disco, we are using. Spotify playlist for 3 stations and cannot afford to pay a DJ or MC for the night. How can we work around this to get everyone's attention for moments like the cake cutting? Fantastic question. I, well, first of all, I just love that you are doing, you're creating an event that serves both of you. This is just brilliant. It's brilliant. Like, this is why, this is why silent discos were literally created. You are likely going to need, I don't know if they have any sort of like, way to communicate with everyone when their headphones are on. I don't know this intimately enough to speak to it really clearly, but you would likely need to— again, 100%— you will probably need to still have speakers if possible, and then designate someone as your emcee to make announcements. And then you can hand them a timeline, and this would be ideally someone who maintains sobriety through a majority of the evening. So they could be looking at a clock and be sure to make those announcements when they need to happen. And then I would also say you could probably get away with not doing a lot of announcements in general. I actually prefer a DJ when they're not on the microphone all the time, because I feel like it's a little less obtrusive and a little less interrupty, if that makes sense. So if you do have speakers that come with the silent disco, I'm not sure if they do or not, see If you can get a microphone with that as well, and then designate someone to be your MC and give them the timeline for that. Only other thing that I can think about, and this is literally only because I saw TikTok about this: make sure you have the paid Spotify so you don't have ads. Y'all hear about that? Like the gal had a band member play the songs, and it was supposed to be from her phone because she had Spotify Premium, and then he played it from his phone, and ads were playing as her bridesmaids were walking down the aisle. I was like, oh no, oh no, this is it. This is a new fear unlocked. Okay. Because he's not a DJ, so he's not— he doesn't do this professionally. So I would have never thought to verify that someone has Spotify Premium until that happened. I was like, oh, bet. Um, so I think you have a great plan. I think you're really sweet and being intentional for your fiancé. That's a lot. So a couple of follow-up questions. Are there speakers involved with this rental? And can you get a microphone with them? Um, and beyond that, you might need to get a speaker, even with just a singular one and a microphone to make announcements. 100 people is a little bit on the bigger side for just hollering. So, plus we don't really ideally want hollering if possible. That's— that would— those would be the kind of tiers of suggestions that I would have.

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 at themasterplanwed.com/community. I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening.

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