Wedding Checklists, the best guide to plan your wedding

I learned quite a few things during my wedding planning process. Planning a wedding is like many things in life, you learn by diving in and going through the process. One thing I learned was creating wedding checklists ahead of time can seriously save you money in the long run. Organization makes a huge difference.

When I was going through the wedding planning, I actually started writing my wedding checklist about a year ahead of time. Yes, some couples don’t even know that they are getting married that far in advance. Obviously many weddings are planned as more of a spur of the moment romantic decision. However, if you happen to have the luxury of some additional planning time like I did, you will find you will be pleased with your decision to make wedding checklists.

My wedding checklists allowed me to write the estimated cost and final cost of all my wedding expenses. In fact, the checklist made sure I accounted for all areas of my wedding I might have otherwise forgotten. For example, I was completely on top of many of the obvious wedding planning expenses. I had already thought through decoration, accessories, my dress and makeup (of course), and the photographer and easily checked these expenses off on my wedding checklist.

However, there were items I had completely overlooked. When I put together my wedding checklist I realized I had left out some items I just didn’t know about, because I had never planned a wedding before. I would have totally forgotten the rental equipment, the chairs, tables, technical equipment and tents if it hadn’t been for my wedding checklist. When I compiled the list, I realized these items would have never crossed my mind. I was able to look into these rentals a year in advance, and this advance time allowed me to shop for the best prices. If I had forgotten about the rentals, and tried to negotiate these rentals at the last minute, it would have cost me a lot more money. You know that stores always love to hike up prices on last minute shoppers.

As obvious as it sounds, many couples actually forget to budget for their honeymoon! I know it sounds crazy. However, when I saw “honeymoon” on my wedding checklist it was a real eye-opener for me. Everyone knows you can really cut down on travel costs by booking in advance. Through arranging our hotel and flight, we were able to save at least a thousand dollars on the total cost of our wedding.

I know for a fact that if I hadn’t seen “honeymoon” on my wedding checklist, there would have been no way I could have remembered to go ahead and pay for it months in advance. As a result, we very likely could have eaten up our honeymoon budget on last minute wedding planning expenses. Again, my wedding checklists saved the day by reminding me of all the important parts of wedding planning that should not be overlooked.

If you liked this article about checklists, feel free to use any of the wedding checklists we have at your disposal on the left.

Or check our Recommended Wedding Suppliers to find some of the best wedding vendors in quality and price from the comfort of your home.

Once you’ve decided to get married it’s time to plan and organize the big event. One of the first things we recommend you do is to set a budget for the whole celebration. Whether you are going to celebrate small or big there are plenty of things that add up.

Use this wedding budget checklist to help you get a general idea of all the costs implied in a wedding. Below you’ll be able to download and print this budget table in order to use it as you like.

Tip #1: The wedding budget checklist above is just a collection of the expenses you may face when organizing your wedding. But if you want to monitor all of your wedding related expenses in a way where you control everything and organize the expenses the way you want it, there is a useful and professional tool that will help you every step of the way managing and controlling your budget: iDo – Wedding couple edition

These are some of the features of this software:

• Monitor all of your wedding related expenses.
• Group your projected expenses into categories.
• Set your wedding budget by specifying budget category estimates.
• iDo totals your expenses and calculates how much money you have remaining based on your total wedding budget number.

Tip #2: You can use the Wedding Cost Estimator at the top of the page to get an idea of the expenses of your wedding, depending on the items you choose.

If you liked this checklist, take a look at our most dateiled and complete wedding timeline checklist.
Or feel free to check our list of recommended wedding vendors.

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