Savings Tip #5: Ditch That Wedding Planner
Tanner |
Thoughtfully composed by Tanner Filed under: Wedding, Ceremony, Reception, Financial Planning |
Oh come on. You are smart, strong, creative, and awesome! You have the ability to do anything and everything that a wedding planner could do AND MORE.
To rid yourselves of $2000 or whatever the going rate is for a stuffy wedding planner, you need to take a note from the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). You, your family, and your girlfriends need to become the Project Managers for this soon to be inexpensive, but extravagant affair.
Lacey’s Wedding Planning Portfolio
STEP 1: Decide what you want. Do you want an extravagant, fancy, expensive wedding with tons of people or do you only want a select few friends and family members with a quiet setting? Decide who? what? when? where? you want your wedding. Sit down and write a list of the possible places you’d like to have it (vegas, beach, church, rooftop, outer space). Scribble down all of the possible guests that you’d like to come and how important they are. Decide what time of year you’d like to have it. Take a ballpark guess what you would ultimately like to spend on your wedding, add $1000, and you have your total cost.
STEP 2: Create a Work Breakdown Structure. You will want to decide all of the BROAD, very VAGUE categories that fit into a wedding. For example: Food is a broad category, the Ceremony is a broad category, the Reception is a vague category that contains many topics, Entertainment is a great category and so on…understand? Basically, choose any major categories that contains a BUNCH of individual activities: Food can be broken up into ‘decide type of food’, ‘visit caterers to sample foods’, ‘decide how much food is needed per person’, ‘negotiate prices’, ‘order food’, ’serving food’, etc etc…you get the point.
Once you have created those categories, you will want to split it into individual activities just like I did above with the food category. Break it down so it is VERY specific. Don’t leave any item out, but if you do, you can add it later. Creating this WBS will help in planning time, costs, and resources needed.
Here is an example pic of a work breakdown structure for a bike
STEP 3: Estimate Time and Costs of Each Activity on Your Work Breakdown Structure. Now that you have every single activity of your wedding planned out, go ahead and put them in the order you think they will go (ex. you must purchase the food, before you may serve it). I like to use post-it notes for this, so I can easily arrange the activities.
Once they are in the proper order, take your best guess as to HOW LONG and HOW MUCH each individual activity will take to do. Write this down on your post-its.
STEP 4: Execute. Now you have all of your activities planned out and you have a good idea how much it will cost and how long it will take. Now you have to do the fun part. Get out there and spend your money and have a great time! If you planned correctly, you shouldn’t go over your budget or time-schedule too badly.
I hope this helps everyone to plan at least a little! Go get em!
Planning a wedding on your own is easy, though finding your future bride or groom may prove slightly more challenging. You can browse free personals and dating tips sites to assist you with finding a love of your own.
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