Congratulations on your engagement! It is such an exciting time when you are first engaged. You might already be getting bombarded by your family and friends about wedding planning things to get you started, but you really should make sure you get your wedding planning journey started off on the right foot. Here are 6 things that you must do after getting engaged to make sure your wedding is planned as smoothly as possible.

1. Celebrate and Soak it In

Before doing ANYTHING besides maybe telling your family and friends, you absolutely need to take some real time to celebrate your engagement! There has been so much love in your relationship and it’s definitely worth celebrating this next step that you are taking together. Have a few date nights, tell stories, and really soak it in that you are getting MARRIED! Don’t dive into wedding planning immediately because you deserve some time to be excited and dream of your perfect wedding day with your family and friends and your next chapter together afterward.

2. Set your Priorities

After taking some much-needed time to get excited about getting married, it’s time to sit down with your soon to be spouse! and talk about what is most important to you for your wedding day. Will you absolutely need an open bar? Do you need to make sure you have an amazing photo gallery? Do you both want your wedding to feel personalized and unique to you? Do you plan on having a packed dance floor? Do you want your guests to have a great time as well as you? These are all some of the things that you need to make sure you talk about to ensure you get exactly what you’re looking for for your wedding day. Make a list of both of your top 3 priorities for the wedding day to use while booking and hiring your vendors.

3. Figure Out your Budget

After you’ve established your top 3 priorities for the wedding, now is the time to figure out your full wedding budget. You can go ahead and look at our blog post here and have a comprehensive plan to establish your wedding budget as simply as possible. Once you look at that blog, you’ll be able to have a very good idea of how to ensure that your total wedding budget is as realistic as possible. The average online for a wedding is $30,000, but honestly that number can vary heavily depending on where you are getting married and the kind of wedding day that you’re looking for.

4. Write a Dream Guest List

The next thing that you will need to do after getting engaged is to write out a wedding guest list. We also have a blog post about this here, but the main goal here is to write everyone that you’re thinking of inviting and then narrow down from there. The quick tip for you on this is to already plan to separate people based on families, how you know them, or groups that would go well together to make it as easy as possible when it’s time to do the seating chart later down the line.

5. Market Research

One of the least glamorous parts about wedding planning is how much research goes into finding and selecting the perfect vendor team for your wedding day. Like we said already the “average” wedding costs $30K, but this is including budgets from one hundred to millions. It’s important to use that priority list to know where you can have some give and take as well. If you are dead-set on having a crazy dance floor, I would recommend putting more funds toward your DJ than your florals let’s say. If you care that every element is flawless, you’ll have to fork out a little more money than you’re expecting to ensure you have a great team to execute your wedding day exactly as you envision.

6. Hire a Planner or Coordinator

To save yourself some stress, time, and money, the easiest next step for you is to hire at least a coordinator, but even a planner. This way, you won’t have to research that perfect vendor team and can actually spend your time having date nights and enjoying yourself while a professional takes care of everything for you. Even having a coordinator that will give you advice along the way or be there to work with your vendors and ensure a lovely wedding day, it is important to have someone there that is advocating for you and your vision of the wedding day!

If you’ve done all of the steps above and you’re ready to hire a coordinator or planner to take all of this work off your plate, you can reach out to us here and set up a quick consultation over the phone! We can make sure you actually enjoy your engagement instead of getting stressed out by it. The goal is that you can really enjoy your wedding day as well as such an exciting time of being engaged!