The hard part is over–she said yes! Now that you have yourself a bride to be, you can get on with the business of being an engaged man. However, once you have mutually decided to get married, the mad flurry of planning a wedding can begin. Trust us, even if both of you are laid-back types, you will definitely find that there are more things to do than you had ever imagined. We’ve put together a very helpful checklist that will help you steer your ship into the port of marriage through the choppy seas of wedding planning.
1. Set a date, any date
The number one question you are going to get when you tell people that you are now engaged is the question “So, when’s the wedding?” It’s impossible to have an exact date pinned down straightaway of course, but being able to tell people that it is in July 2014, for example, is really going to make your life more simple. It will also help people to keep that space free in their minds, ready to receive your wedding invite.
2. Open a new savings account
Painful though it is to talk about, weddings are very, very expensive. Even if you plan to beg, borrow, and steal, we guarantee you that the wedding costs will add up even though you swore you were trying to cut costs wherever you could. You need to put aside money in a new savings account. Open up a new account especially for this purpose and discipline yourself not to touch the money.
3. Get a planner
No, not a cheerful man or woman whose job it is to wrangle wedding bouquets and bully the caterers. Those are expensive. What you need is a good system of organisation–like Filofax, or the Evernote app. You can use whatever you like, just make sure that you’ve got something that keeps you on top of all your wedding planning.
4. Guestlist fun
And when we say “fun”, what we really mean is agony. It would be polite to ask the bridal party who they want to invite to the wedding, then ask your friends and family who they want to invite, and try to make your guest list a blend of the two. You still have more time to narrow it down, but making a balanced guest list, broken down into tiers via who is the most important, will save you hassle down the line.
5. Have an engagement party!
Okay, this is the fun part. You don’t have to rent a hall, a hotel, or restaurant. Just get all your friends and family to your house or to a local bar and have fun the cheap and cheerful way.
So, there you have it, a guide to starting off your engagement the fuss free way. Although, we might have missed one important thing out–the first thing you’re going to have to do is to resize the engagement ring. We know, we know–you picked out the ring, she said yes and you thought the hard part was over. Well chances are the ring doesn’t fit, so take her down to the jewellers and get the band resized to fit her finger. We just thought we’d tell you ahead of time.
Source: http://www.weddingsite.co.uk/tour/wedding-budget-planner
