Wedding Party Updates, Website Must-Haves & Venue Fee Surprises | 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. How do you balance giving your bridesmaids enough information to do what they need to do without overwhelming them with details? I thought I had some good ideas for this, but I feel like I need a sanity check. I'm writing up a Google Form to send them to To gather important info and some fun stuff like their favorite snack or coffee shop order. Oh, Jamie, that's cute. So I can avoid asking too many questions in a group chat, and so everyone has a private space to answer honestly. Some people have very embarrassing coffee orders. I'm just kidding. I worked at Starbucks for a very long time. Some people have some very weird orders, I will tell you that. Um, however, anytime I've told someone about this, I feel a little embarrassed. Just seems like a lot. I was also planning on making a single Google Doc with all the details so that they can peruse as needed. I do sections and headings and a need-to-know tab so it's navigable. As a bridesmaid, I would personally love something like this, but I understand that receiving a long document with all this info all at once might feel like a lot of pressure. Um, I want my bridesmaids to feel like being a part of our wedding is an easy and fun experience. I'm not sure my approach is the right one. What do you think? Okay. First of all, I just love your spirit and I love that you're so concerned about inundating your bridesmaids with this information. I personally think it's in the delivery of how you discuss it with them. If you want to be like, hey, so I put together this document, it might read a little gnarly at first, but you know me, right? They already know you. They are probably not going to be surprised in the slightest if they opened up a 10-page spreadsheet with like all of the information where you're just like, I already have it all organized for you. You can fill it out if you want to. They know you, so I don't. I wouldn't concern yourself too much with overloading them if your delivery is something along the lines of or something akin to. Hey, so put this together. I actually just want to have a place where we put like have all of this information about you guys that I can refer to. Personally, I would prefer to have more information than not enough information. I think having a need to know tab is like. Super brilliant. And I think maybe if you're explaining it to people and you feel slightly embarrassed, I feel like the only people that would get you or would understand you or would go, yeah, that makes sense that you did that, would be the people that you're asking to stand with you. So, um, I think that I would word vomit as much as of— as much of it as you want to onto these documents and then go, do I really need all this? Okay. And maybe pare it down, maybe edit yourself a little bit if you need to. Um, but I have worked with and been in weddings of brides of kind of all different sorts of vibes where you're just like, hey, I, I would love information from you if you don't mind. Or the opposite of like, oh, you have literally everything and it's color-coded, brilliant, I don't care. Both of them work. So I think that keep proceeding as you see fit, and maybe as you're describing it to people, they don't need to know all the details. Like, well, yeah, I'm putting together a couple different— no. Google Sheets and forms and whatnot, just so I can have all their favorite things in one place and make sure they have all the information if they want to like jump over and refer to it whenever they need to. That sounds nice. If you decide to go into all the details of it, you might, you might sound a little bit more overwhelming, but my guess is, again, just to really drive this point home, they are some of your favorite humans, and I highly doubt they're going to be surprised. And in fact, they might be anticipating it, so I think you're okay. 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 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 Really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to weddingpriorities.com. Danielle said we are planning to send out our save the dates by the end of the month. We'll be sending everything digitally and choose the wedding website platform with this in mind. Chose, chose. Got it. Don't worry about it. What I'm having an issue with is the site requires the couple to publish their personal website before sending the save the dates. What information should we have there this early on? We won't even have engagement photos done until fall. Oh yeah, yeah, okay. This is one of those like obnoxious, like detailed questions that sometimes you find yourself in. Do you have any photos of you guys throughout your, for lack of a better term, courtship that you could put up there? Just so it doesn't feel naked, just so it doesn't feel like you got really nothing going on there. Another thing I'd like to see done usually when we are sending out save the dates and on the website is some sort of— and don't panic when you hear this, okay? Remember I say some sort of, not fully completed, but some sort of registry. So like, hey, we're starting one here, it only has a handful of items on it, because typically etiquette says for a lot of, a lot of people in a lot of cultures is once they receive it, they want to go look at the website, and then your registry can be available for wedding showers, etc. Uh, we loaded our website with photos of our pets until we had our engagement photos sent. That's super cute. That's adorable. Um, so I would say yes, just something to have on there because yeah, if all we're sending them is save the dates, you gotta publish something, put a couple photos on there if you can. If you can have some sort of registry or some sort of holding place for a registry, I don't know how much editing your website allows you to do where you say, Registry coming soon. Those would be the kind of things that people are looking for, but you can really keep it truly bare bones if you want to. So don't stress about it too much. Save the dates are a courtesy and they are definitely a bonus, but they're not a requirement. So just know that you are over-informing your guests in a really, really wonderful way. So put up there what you have capacity to put up there, and then the rest will fall into place when you're ready to put it up. Chelsea said, I have found an idyllic— oh, I love that word— idyllic wedding venue with rave reviews available on our preferred date. Hooray! However, of course, we have to use their caterer starting at $65 a head. They get rave reviews too. Not only are the typical rentals included, but the venue also offers a day-of coordinator as well as a butler. Oh, fine. Specifically to attend to the couple. All of this is in budget. Now to what isn't in budget, the unlimited open bar. Oof. However, they do have a $7 drink option. Every, uh, every one of our guests would need to drink 5+ drinks to equal the unlimited package. In your experience, are these drink— are these per-drink agreements a slippery slope? I don't want to get sticker shock at the end of the wedding. Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. Typically though, general rule of thumb, of course you might have different, different crew in your, in your neck of the woods, but it's 1 drink per person per hour of bar service. So if you have your cocktail hour and then you have your reception for 4 hours, you're looking at 5 drinks per person. So 1 drink per hour per person. So it depends on how long your event is going to be. That's probably why they designate it this way, because it is pretty much average. It's pretty much spot on if you're looking at 5 drinks per person. If you go, listen, half of our family doesn't drink, they just don't, or, you know, oftentimes for religious or even personal reasons, you just have large swaths of people who don't imbibe, that would make sense to then swap over to the $7 drink policy. As is, if you have a crew that drinks the average amount, The numbers do line up if you were doing 1 hour during cocktail hour and then 4 hours during reception for a total of 5 drinks per person. So 1 per person per hour, 'cause you will get those who have more, you have those that have less, but that is the best average that we in the industry cling to in situations 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 at 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 5-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!