When do i start planning?

I booked all my big items right away .. I secured previous year pricing before they went up and secured our date as well.. now all we have left is little stuff and the details ... so now I can take my time and enjoy the ride to the finish line lol

We are getting married Sunday, May 2018 and we already have our venue and DJ booked. For us the 2 most important elements of our day and budget is Food and Entertainment! So we make sure we booked those first to make sure we got the venue and DJ we wanted. Glad we did because 2 of the venues we looked at already had our date booked! My advice would be highlight the areas of your wedding that are the most important and get those items booked first.

I definitely agree with Melissa. We were engaged for 2.5 years so for the first year we mostly just enjoyed being engaged and starting thinking about the overall picture of what we want our wedding day to look like. Ours was a destination wedding for us so we planned a few trips to go and visit venues. We ended up booking our venues about a year in advance. After that we started researching vendors and reaching out to them for pricing and making spreadsheets so we could narrow down our options. Once you have the major vendors in place (photographer, videographer, DJ, hair/makeup, cake, officiant), then you can start working on the little projects like invitations, decorations, etc.

It definitely helps to spread it out like Melissa said! It always seemed so far in the distance that the last 6 months really snuck up on us! We were able to get everything done in time but it would have been better to have some things finished a bit earlier so that we wouldn't have had as many late nights in the last month before the wedding!

Hi Taylor! I'm so happy you're reaching out about this! I see that you already got amazing comments from our super brides You can also check out these checklist I made to help you start planning: How To Start Planning Your Wedding

Checklist: Things to Do 12 months before the wedding

One year in advance is not too early, and you'll see everything will go smoothly if you start early. Simone is also a student and working and she says the planning is going well so far. Feel free to reach out any time. We'll be there to help! In what type of venue would you like to celebrate your wedding?

Hi Taylor,

Welcome to the Community!

You have plenty of time, though October is now considered “peak season” at some venues, so you’ll want to get your venue and photographer booked sooner rather than later, then you can just take things one at a time. Make a time line with a few things to research and book in the coming months.

Plus it sounds like your family wants to be involved, you could always ask if they wanted to help with a few things. My mom was over the moon when I let her look into bakeries for me (even though I had already done a ton of research, she did end up finding 1 I did not and it is a SERIOUS contender)

And you have this wonderful community to help you out now!! You can always post a thread if you're having trouble deciding on something or need some input from some helpful internet strangers

Anytime! I literally love these chats for hearing other people's stories and expereinces and helping eachother!

It is so sweet of your FH to want you to focus on school- no wonder you picked him!

I also understand your guest list and trying to make everyone happy. That can be a hard conversation to have. We have decided to ahve a smalll(14 people, photogs included!) privately, and host a cocktail part that night with guests to celebrate....you can bet a LOT of people had lots to say about that....but I promise it will work out in the end. Just explain that you guys have to stay within your means, and you want a certain kind of wedding and you hope people will respect that...they usually come around

Thanks for the response! Being on a student budget makes it a little harder but my fiance wants to take on a large part of the wedding payments so I can focus on school - I also have some help from my family. We are extremely lucky! We only want about 80 people - 100 max, but I tend to lean towards 80. Making everyone happy with the wedding planning has proven to be difficult. Thanks again!

Tay

Awesome!! Thank you for the advice. We have already looked at a few but its so hard to pick one! My fiance keeps talking about moving the date up so I think I better start planning quick!

Tay

You luckily have lots of time to plan- but if you want to avoid overloading yourself and stressing, I would suggest starting to plan right away! This way you can "bite off" little chunks as you go. Planning bit by bit will also allow you to spread out deposits and payments- I remeber being a student on a budget- and it can be hard! I can't imagine paying for a wedding at the same time!

Of course, if you are planning a small wedding things get easier to plan with less lead time, so if small wedding is what you want you can relax a bit.

Please keep coming back and sharing your plans and ideas! I'm excited to watch your plans unfold!

Usually you need to book venues about a year in advance! You can always research things and when you have time off at Christmas or in the summer from school you can go and actually start looking at venues! You have plenty of time so you can always start off slow for now and then when you have more time on your hands, tackle the bigger things! I got engaged in March and my wedding is next August, I planned pretty much everything already. I just have small little things left!