I’m a newbie and I really need help on how to start!

Start with a rough guest list, then email a bunch of halls and ask their pricing pp. then go visit them and book which hall thats in your budget, then book the ceremony, photographer, video, flowers, decor, dress, suits, cake, food/booze (if ur hall doesnt include it)

Congrats!

Welcome to the community of guidance and help towards anything you need to know. We are always a helping hand to put our experiences towards your planning.

So the guest list that would be created will be useful for your venue and vendors to know how many to expect. Next would be looking into WW Checklist to see what you wish to consider doing for your day. WW Budget is also a great tool that will allow you to put in your spending budget and actual spending to calculate towards your day. This site has much to offer as well as the seating chart for guests to sit where you wish and how the table arrangements can be made to you.

We started with a first draft of our guest list and based on that, narrowed down venue possibilities. We also identified who we wanted in our wedding party and asked those... luckily all said yes! From there, I have been using the checklist on Wedding Wire and have been checking off and following the guidelines and advice from the site. Also, keeping note of sales that come up for invitation printing, rings, etc that we could take advantage of through Black Friday (maybe Boxing Day coming up?) I have been perusing the posts on the community as well for ideas and what not. Good luck and happy planning!

Congratulations and welcome to wedding wire. I think we started with guest list (to know which venue would be appropriate) and a rough budget. From there we found our venue and set the date. Wedding wire has great check lists to help you along the way so you don't forget anything.

First thing we did was find a venue. After that its only the details. The venue we found was expensive but we have to for four days (we are renting out a camp ground). After you find the venue you can start with the smaller details. Personally I am doing everything as cheep as i can. Itll be the best days of my life but i don't want to be in debt over it.
Give yourself A LOT of time to plan and make changes if needed.

I think all this is really great advice. A lot of people are saying to determine a budget first, but I think it's more to figure out a ballpark budget, not a solid one. Are you in for 10k? 30k? 60k? Getting that sense of what you might be able to afford helps with the next stage which is figuring out venue/catering.


A lot of places post prices on their websites, so use that as a guideline. When i was first looking, there were places that were charging $125 pp for 3 courses. I immediately crossed them off as too expensive, but as i did more research, i discovered that, sure they were on the high end, but not crazy. It takes work but try to figure out the packages you'd want for your day.
Build up what you want with the online info available then pick the places that could fit your budget. By this time, you'll have started to learn what the general costs can be and will adjust your ballpark budget accordingly and start to solidify it. We started with a ballpark 10k-20k, upped it to 25k and are sitting at around 27k plus honeymoon.
Once you get your venue and catering costs figured out, you can budget that at around 50% of your overall. Again, this is completely variable. The great and most difficult thing is there are no hard and fast rules when planning a wedding. It's a process and things WILL change. Feel free to use this forum for help throughout. Congratulations!!

We started by talking about what we each wanted for our wedding and what we wanted to avoid. It helped us realize we both cared about the photos, and that he wanted a small guest list. From there we could do a bit of research on smaller venues and photographers and discuss what we were comfortable spending.


The hardest part for me was making a budget without really knowing how much things could cost. Is $1000 enough for a dress? Can we get a photographer for under $1500? It helped to do a little window shopping first and finding out what parts of our budget would need to be the biggest.
We chipped away at the big items first, our photographer, then our venue (both date specific), and my dress. Now we have small to medium tasks left like cake, decor/flowers, and music!

It is hard to know where to, but pick your reception venue as well as your ceremony first off. Then photographer and videographer. The dress and the theme and colors for your wedding and the rest of the stuff just falls into place. The earlier you start the easier it seems to go. We bought a lot of our decore off of local wedding buy and sell sites. We have resold lots of the items again afterwards. We have gotten back over $900 and counting. Use the checklists on here to give you a timeline and ideas of just what you require for your wedding. Not everything applies to every wedding. Delete what doesn't apply. Add items, if necessary. Happy planning!

Hey Sydney!

First off, congratulations on your engagement and welcome to the WeddingWire community!

As for your question, I would definitely start thinking about your budget and guest list. It's important to start here so you know first of all, how much you want to spend on a venue, food, booze (if any, at all), florals and decor, etc. Second, the guest list determines what kind of venues you'll be looking into. If you only have a wedding of 50 guests, for example, you can look at small venues, 100+ and you might want to look into banquet halls, golf courses and larger type venues.

Once you've mapped that out - pick a date! Once you've got a budget, guest count and date, you should start touring venues ASAP.

I also recommend looking into photography early. They tend to book up super quick!

Welcome to wedding wire. They have a great check list to keep you on track.

I would start with a budget, then venue. After you have this set, you can begin to look at vendors and get quotes.

I recommend starting with looking into venues. I found it hard to start planning because with all the advice saying "start with your budget" I didn't know what a reasonable budget would be!! I found that once I started looking at venues and their meal packages I was able to better discern "okay that one is far too expensive and it doesn't offer what this one does, this one is cheap but has so little with the minimum that we would need to add on, this one is good, this one is reasonable, etc". That helped me figure out what my food spend was going to be, and I was able to budget from there!

I also found it helpful to set price points for each individual item rather than trying to budget the entire thing in one go. So I would say "okay this is what i want to spend on my dress. This is what i want to spend on decor. Flowers cost more than I thought? No problem, I'll reduce my decor budget to make room for flowers, etc".

Start with talking about budget with your FH and both your families to see where you stand. I don't know many brides that stay within their budget, but having a sense of what you're working with is really helpful in knowing where to allocate certain funds in the beginning and finding out what's the most important things to you and FH. Then start with choosing your date, or at least narrow it down to a few that you'd be happy with that way if the venue you like is booked on your first date choice then you will have a fall back. Unless you're not picky about the date then going straight to vendor searching is easier and you can ask what dates they have available and take your pick.
After that you can figure out catering, if the venue offers it then that's another thing crossed off the list, and if not then decide what time you want to serve food (breakfast and lunch meals tend to be cheaper, if you have a certain budget and not as much alcohol tends to get consumed earlier). Then figuring out theme would be next on my list, and you can take your venues style into account to help you with an aesthetic.

There is so much to do to plan a wedding - I totally get feeling frazzled!

My suggestion would be to find the venue first with your date. Every other vendor is going to ask for the date and your venue, and, where some venues do their own catering, you'll know whether you'll have to look for a caterer/food too. It'll make booking the other vendors easier.