Essential Wedding Checklist?

by Alicia
(Newcastle)

I got engaged recently and I’m a bit of wedding novice. I’ve only ever been to one wedding and that was when I was seven! (I’m now 20!). Please can you help me with the little things that I might overlook?

That would be great, thank you.

Alicia in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England

Answer:

Well, congratulations on your engagement – how exciting! It can be pretty overwhelming organising a wedding, after all, it’s something that most of us do in our lives only once! Since it is something we do only once, there are quite a few little things that are pretty confusing or easily overlooked. So below, I’ve outlined some of these, so help steer you in the right direction.

The labyrinth of official documentation
One of the first things you need to do is all the official stuff. For me, this was all pretty daunting and the information around isn’t that clear and therefore it’s confusing. It’s easy to overlook this, but you’ll need to get a number of things done in order to officially get married.

First off, you need to decide whether you’re going to have a religious or civil ceremony. Whichever you choose, go and see your local celebrant or register office and they’ll be able to guide you through the rest.

I’m not going to cover off what you need to do for all the different religions as we’d be here all day and as it happens the Citizens Advice Bureau does it very nicely.

Keeping track of the little things
Many brides write in telling me about how they underestimated what things cost. They found their prices, quotes and spending crept up as they got closer to their wedding.

In particular, some of the little things got missed off. Items such as table confetti, make-up or little decorations can easily get forgotten. And if you don’t keep track of them, you can soon find you’re spending more than you bargained for. There are a couple of really good articles that will help you keep a watch out for common pitfalls and traps, both with planning and budgeting:
Common wedding budget traps
Golden rules of sticking to your budget
The 7 sins of wedding planning

What to do when
Finally, the other baffling thing about getting married is working out what you should be doing when. There are a hundred and one things to do and knowing what do when so it all fits into place is tricky.

There are lots of wedding planners around and many of the magazines do pull-out versions that you can put on the wall and tick off as you go along. These are really handy and make sure you keep on top of everything.

There’s a free wedding planner with a budget, timeline, things to do, guest tracker and table planner in my free wedding planner. You can get this when you sign up for my Cheap Wedding Tips newsletter.

There are also a couple of articles that will help you in this area too. The first is a wedding countdown for what you need to do when and the second focuses on what you need to do and prepare for your wedding reception.

I wish you the best of luck and if you need any more help, just ask away!