Through planning our own wedding and helping thousands of other brides with theirs since, I’ve worked out how best to plan your wedding with purpose, according only to what’s really important to you (and what fits within your wedding budget).

Why do you need to Prioritise your Wedding?

If you’ve just started wedding planning, it’s easy to become submerged in ideas and advice, to the point where you forget the entire point of your engagement and wedding, and get lost simply ‘going along’ with every little detail (even those which aren’t important to you).
If you set your wedding priorities before you begin, you can continue to return to them any time you’re feeling lost or overwhelmed. Your priorities are the few elements of your wedding on which you put first and perhaps even those which you splurge on. However, that might mean readjusting your wedding budget and cutting out some of those elements which aren’t so important – and that’s totally okay!

How to Set your Priorities with your Fiancé

Before you begin anything else, sit down with your fiancé and each write a list of what’s really important to you for the wedding day. Writing it down is a great way to do so, because you’ll be able to independently allocate yours without being influenced by your his/her choices.
It also means you both have to contribute to the discussion (rather than he or she deferring to ‘you decide). Include it in your little white book wedding planner and you’ll always have them in a safe place to return to, and a keepsake from right at the beginning of your journey.
Having these honest conversations won’t always be easy, because you may be on completely different pages about what’s important – but it’s so much better to know now and get on the same ‘page’ together.
You may surprise yourselves and completely agree on your priorities list (you are getting married, after all!) in which case it will be all the more easy to cut out elements (and expenses) that just don’t mean much to you.

Stay Mindful and Consider your Priorities as you Plan

Be mindful that there’s no point in listing your priorities and then getting carried away with everything else and forgetting about them along the way. I suggest not only choosing, but actually organising your priorities first, so that those areas of your budget are ‘squared away’ before you get onto everything else. You may find that once you’ve organised the important things, you’re actually more prepared to cut out other things as you realise their value to you isn’t that high.
If you don’t organise your wedding planning priorities first, you risk organising other elements and running into a budget deficit when you find out how much those all-important priorities might cost, and it’s too late.

How Setting Priorities will actually help you Plan Your Wedding

Another reason for setting your priorities before you even begin your wedding budget is that it’ll make every other step much easier. You’ll have a really clear view of what you want for your Big Day, allocate your budget accordingly, and each time you find yourself wavering on other decisions, refer back to the lists you made together. Was it a meaningful component of your dream day? Yes? Fabulous. No? Cut it out.

Once you’ve had this all important conversation and written your lists in your little white book, head to wedding planning advice so that you can get started with wedding planning with purpose.