More Than Living

Handy tips and advice for organising your wedding

If you read my guy’s guide to buying an engage­ment ring, you might be pleased to know that she didn’t leave me stran­ded at the altar. We suc­cess­fully tied the knot a month or two ago. So what did I learn from the exper­i­ence of organ­ising a wedding?

Com­mu­nic­ate
If there’s one thing you have to do, that’s keep talk­ing to each other. We learnt some useful les­sons about honest com­mu­nic­a­tion. It was remark­able how dif­fer­ent our expect­a­tions and ideas were. Make time to sit down and talk through your plans on a reg­u­lar basis.

Give yourselves time, but not too much
How long to leave between engage­ment and wed­ding? Sev­eral friends said get it done sooner rather than later as they’d spent months plan­ning (and arguing) over what to do to and by the end felt they’d have been better off just get­ting on with it. We did it in just over 6 months. And, that wasn’t quite long enough. We could have done with 9. There were sev­eral decisions we felt pres­sured into making because there wasn’t time to con­sider other options. In par­tic­u­lar, be aware that it takes a good six months to get a wed­ding dress ordered and fitted!

Go for a less busy time of year
We mar­ried in mid-​​July. This meant we had a slightly higher chance of good weather. (Thank­fully the sun did indeed shine). But it’s peak wed­ding season – so no like­li­hood of nego­ti­at­ing many dis­counts and a real danger that people might have other wed­dings to go to on the same day or be away on summer hol­i­days. Get mar­ried in the Autumn or Winter (and con­sider a Friday rather than a Sat­urday) and more people are likely to be able to come and you’ll save a con­sid­er­able amount of money.

Ask for dis­counts
It seems like the moment you men­tion the word ‘wed­ding’ the price of everything goes up. It might not be par­tic­u­larly romantic, but so what? I asked for dis­counts from every­one. Often I didn’t get any, but I did save a good few hun­dred pounds on the mar­quee hire.

Set a budget
The awful truth is that wed­dings are expens­ive. I couldn’t believe the fig­ures that you see saying the aver­age cost of a UK wed­ding is around ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​09-​​13 16:20:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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