So you just got engaged, now what?

The first thing I’d say to newly engaged couples is: Congratulations! In the wedding industry, so many vendors have been doing it for so long that they forget that for most couples this is their first experience with anything even remotely related to wedding planning. Even if you’ve talked about marriage in your relationship before, the transition from dating to knowing you’ll be together for the rest of your lives is so, so special, and congratulations on that! cue the confetti!!

Next, I’d say to nail down a date.

Step One: Nail Down a Date

Nailing down a date gets a little bit tricky depending on what year you’re getting married. If you got engaged in the last holiday months of last year and are also wanting to get married in the upcoming year, the odds of you getting the exact date you want are not the highest. But the odds of this change a lot if you set your sights on a wedding date two years from now, or even a wedding date next year depending on the season. Fall dates go first, Spring, then Summer, ending with Winter! This may be more opinion based, and regional, but in Georgia couples always want fall, avoid Summer like the plague, but ultimately prefer it over Winter! Saturday/Sunday wedding dates go first, and then Friday’s, but truly people get married every day of the year! The only week day I have yet to plan is a Tuesday, but trust me, people get married on that day too!

A better approach is to aim for a season you want to get married, a specific month, and research venues that have availability in your date range. But this could also change a bit if you have very specific vendors in mind for who you want, I recommend securing those first then booking the venue! Once your date with the venue is locked in, you may find that a lot of vendors are already booked depending on the year and season.

If you’re a recently engaged bride getting married within the next twelve months, I highly recommend getting a very clear idea of which vendors you absolutely need to have at your wedding: get date ideas from them (of what they still have available), then finalize your date, book the vendors, and venue hunt. For brides getting married next year, many vendors opened their books in the new year, so now is the perfect time to vendor search, pick a date, and secure your venue! For brides getting married in two years, you can more loosely follow this recommendation and likely be able to pick your date, venue, and then book your vendors; depending on who it is, they may not even have their 2027 books open, so definitely keep an eye on that - sometimes it’s even worth still inquiring in case they have a waitlist or an email list for when their books do open (as a note, this can be dependent on the service - for reference, a planner will likely be booking out further than a wedding photographer)! The more important a vendor is to you, the more important it is to immediately secure them!

Step Two: Get a Preliminary Guest List together

Now that you have your date range for your wedding day picked, you should get a preliminary guest list together! It’s understandable that you wouldn’t know every single person you’ll be inviting, but it’s good to have a general idea of how many people you may end up inviting.

Having a general guest list will be extremely helpful when booking your venue and talking to caterers. You will frequently be asked for your estimated guest count, and this is not expected to be finalized until closer to the wedding - this is for the purpose of giving you and your partner an estimated pricing quote that will be the most accurate to avoid sticker shock when you see the final invoice!

Ceremony set-up at the Atlanta History Center's Swan House in Buckhead (Atlanta, Georgia)

This also applies when venue searching, if you book a venue with a capacity of 150 but you end up wanting to invite 200 further down the line, this could cause a lot of frustration with having to cut your guest list down, or even cancelling your contract with that venue and finding another one if that’s the route you ended up wanting to go down.

Or, you could find while putting your guest list together, that you actually want a more intimate wedding! So instead of booking a venue with a capacity of 150, you could end up wanting to save a little extra money to put towards something else by reserving a smaller wedding venue, or a local park! We've planned with couples that have booked venues and many other vendors with guest counts in the low hundreds only to realize a year out that they want to cut costs and have a more intimate wedding, so I highly recommend pulling your guest count together very early in the planning process.

Step Three: Tackle the budget

Now that you have your date range and guest list, it’s time to tackle the budget! We have seen far too many couples get trigger happy with wedding bookings only to find months later that their budget has spiraled out of control. Even though budget planning is likely the least fun part of the process, we highly recommend getting it out of the way first for wedding planning to be as least stressful as possible.

Our guide to wedding budgets is:

• First- set the overall budget. Who’s financing what parts of the wedding? Are there any parents contributing? Is it all coming from savings? Pull that number together with what you are comfortable spending.

• From here, list all of the wedding vendors you’d be booking in order of priority. Are you pumped about having your dream photographer but not a huge floral fan? Photography needs to be way higher on that list. Would you skip the DJ but possibly want a band? That needs to be incorporated! Make a list by priority!

• Once this is done, do market research to see what’s realistic for each where you’ll plan to get married. If photography is your number one priority, that starts at around $4,000 for an experienced photographer at its base pricing (depending on the market). All of this to say, if you set your photography max at $2,000, do that knowing you’ll get someone more entry level which is completely fine if you want memories of the day but don’t want all the bells and whistles!

• Once your market research is done, go down the list and fill in the numbers! Here's an example list made by Autumn (lead planner of The Fetch Bride), "I’d say for my wedding, my most important vendors would be: Venue, catering, photography, videography, florist, DJ, coordinator, hair, and makeup. Off the top of my head I know the average pricing for each of these - Venue I’d be comfortable capping at about $7500, Catering $7000, Photography $5000, Video $5000, Florist $3500, DJ $2000, Coordinator $2000, Hair/Makeup $750, and that right there is about $30,000. But even while I was making this list, I realized that I prioritize hair and makeup more than say my DJ but I wouldn’t expect to pay more for hair & makeup than my DJ so it shifted lower on the list. This list is really just a great guiding point for what your budget will look like."

It's also important to indicate for yourself if there’s any wiggle room with each vendor: it all depends on your priorities, your budget, and what you think your guest count will be! But without this list, you’ll end up going into wedding planning hearing quotes without knowing what your personal baseline is. And with this list, it’s the exact order that you should book your vendors in, you know your priorities, you know your budget guidelines, so that should also be your booking order! As you're receiving quotes, if you make sure they’re within your baseline initial budget, you will come out on the other side pretty close to what you were comfortable spending overall. 

Wedding party portraits at Ashton Gardens Atlanta (Sugar Hill, Georgia), Photo by Toni Angelina Photography

Another example from Autumn, "I don’t want to spend more than about $7500 for my venue, say I pick my top 3 and get price quotes. One comes in at about $6000, one at $7200, and one at $10,000. Looking back at my initial budget plan, it is my highest priority, but I’m not willing to have any wiggle room there because I want to save that for later down the line when I book my media vendors. If I love the $7200 venue, I’d go with that one, and then I’d end up having about $300 extra that can go towards a different booking! That being said, budgets can get very tricky, very confusing, and very stressful, very fast. If any of you listening have specific budget questions, feel free to send me a message on Instagram and I’d be happy to take a look at yours! My instagram is @thefetchbride"

Avoiding Wedding Sticker Shock

But we can’t talk about budgets without talking about the sticker shock that comes from planning one. We see all the fairy tale Pinterest, TikTok, Vogue, or Instagram weddings, and before we even know anything about money, we’re planning a wedding from age 7. But then we all grow up and learn about capitalism and just how much a wedding can cost.

We want to start by saying that it is not at all helpful that if you google the average wedding spend something like $30,000 pops up. Of course this is all based on your area, guest list, and so many other factors, but truly on average I see about $50,000 being typical for weddings. With my sample budget earlier, the vendors I listed got me to about $32,000, right there that’s already over the “national average,” that wouldn’t include cake or desserts, attire, rentals like linens; signage; bar, or anything else I’d want to have! In general I think I’d try to max out at about $50,000 for a wedding but pretty soon I think that’ll be considered the low end for weddings.

But by saying that we have to acknowledge wedding price gouging. From being in the wedding industry, many industry professionals are desensitized to seeing and sending out invoices for such large amounts, but the acknowledgement of just how expensive weddings are is important. And for that amount, it’s so incredibly important to treat couples like you’re planning for one of the biggest days of your life - because you are! Every single couple is so significant, and unfortunately for many people it’s just another day at work.

On the flip side of that, there are so many vendors we know, have worked with, and love, who truly do this because they’re passionate about it and not just for the pay-check and it’s important to highlight those vendors and stop giving other vendors who are known for making their couples feel unimportant a platform. Many amazing vendors that you book also have preferred vendor lists so we highly recommend asking your vendors for that! Not only will your vendors be more like minded and united in the cause of getting you married, but vendors that have worked together before always provide a more unified front and are used to each other’s wedding day styles!

For us as planners, we take huge note of everything in a vendor’s workflow, how they send emails, how responsive they are, and of course what they’re like on a wedding day. If someone is added to our preferred vendors list it will only be because they are absolutely amazing and we'd love to work with them again!

Hiring a Wedding Planner

After talking about dates, guest lists, budget, and price gouging, the next natural step is to talk about wedding planners. To start out, there are 3 different levels to wedding planning: full-service planning, partial planning, and day coordination.

Wedding table-scape design at The Garden Room in St. Regis - Buckhead (Atlanta, Georgia)

Full-service wedding planners work with you from the very beginning, either right after engagement when you start planning, or right after you’ve booked your venue. It depends on the full-service planner, but typically they give you vendor recommendations, review vendor contracts, will attend your vendor meetings, design your wedding, put together your budget, coordinate your wedding day, mailing your save the dates & invites, and really be your third hand with literally everything wedding planning related. Full-service planners are great for couples that work full-time jobs and don’t have the time to plan their wedding, or just want to hand it off to a professional! This is a great match for Type B brides that need someone to keep them organized and on track!

Partial wedding planners do about half of that! Usually they come in about 6 months before the wedding and organize all of your information and get you to the finish line! They attend your final venue walk-through, design your wedding, coordinate the wedding day, mail your invites, and make any final decisions with you or answer any burning questions you have! Partial planners are super helpful for couples with decision fatigue who need someone to see their vision and finish putting the puzzle pieces together! This is great for Type A brides who want to make all the big decisions and do the heavy lifting themselves, but want a guiding hand for later on down the line!

Day of (or sometimes called month of) coordinators take everything you have done during your time planning, and keep the wedding day organized. This person will do your wedding day timeline, go over your wedding day details, coordinate with your previously booked vendors, and keep you from having to stress about tiny details on your wedding day!

Personally, we don’t think every couple needs a full-service planner, and any good full-service wedding planner you’re inquiring with should tell you that. Some couples are much better suited for partial planning, or even day of coordination - based on their planning timeline or the scale of their wedding. A lot of venues require a day of coordinator, but even without that, we truly believe every couple will benefit from having a day of coordinator. Your wedding day flows so much smoother without you even noticing because you won’t have to look over your shoulder every five minutes to make sure the seating chart got put out. Your day of coordinator will keep people from bothering you with tiny questions, which is how it should be!

But despite how in your face wedding planning can be, what we try to tell all couples is to enjoy the wild, crazy, and at times stressful, journey of wedding planning. Your engagement period will be shorter than how long you dated, and much shorter than how long you are ultimately married for, point being? You will never be engaged to each other again! So no matter what happens, try to enjoy being a fiancé before you are upgraded to spouse!

We hope this list of starter tips after getting engaged was helpful! For more wedding planning tips after engagement, read through our other blog posts here, check out our Instagram account here, or inquire with us here for more personalized next steps on the road to your big day!