First and foremost, congratulations on your engagement! Your partner has officially popped the question, and after the tears were dried and the laughter subdued, it is likely that your thoughts quickly turned to venues, caterers, cake, and decor! It’s easy to get overwhelmed! To start your wedding planning off on the right foot, here are the five steps you should do straight away, after getting engaged we recommend to take!

Share the good news 

After you just got engaged, these are the five steps you should do straight away, first off you will want to tell everyone about the engagement:

• When and where it happened
• How your partner asked you
• What kind of ring you received
• Everything in between

As a rule of thumb, if you would be upset by hearing about someone’s engagement on social media, make sure you give those people a phone call before you start posting photos. Start with family, then move to basically-family friends, and then tell everyone else.

If you want to throw an engagement party, the planning for the event can start now! By the way…we can help with that!

Pick a date…or two…or three

The most desirable wedding dates can often be booked far in advance, especially right now during COVID. Many couples are selecting dates 2 years from the date they were engaged. My advise is to start thinking about venues and dates immediately after you are engaged. Start with deciding on what season you would like to be married in and start narrowing down from there.

Do you need to work around other family events? Once you narrow down the time frame, decide on two or three possible dates, so when you visit venues, if one of your dates are already booked, you have a couple of other options to choose from.

As we are currently living in a pandemic, all of the weddings from 2020 have booked into 2021 and 2022 so I would definitely think about starting to look at venues sooner than you might of previously and you might have to be more flexible on dates than you were before.

We often research and use our extensive venue knowledge to help our full service planning couples with venue selection.

Draft a guest list

It would be nice to be able to invite everyone you know to celebrate your wedding, but in most cases, your budget would suffer if you do not narrow it down to the most important people in you and your fiancé’s life! Before deciding on your budget or heading out to venues, draft a guest list to get a good idea of how many people you can afford to invite, so you can have the number of guests in mind before committing to a venue.

Again, as we are living in a pandemic and we all really hope that we can go back to larger weddings but I would suggest to have a guest list of 100 of the guests that are a must and then other guests.  Just in case you have to reduce your guests list to 100 or less.

Work out a budget

Although discussing financials may not be the most glamorous part of planning a wedding, it is definitely one of the most crucial. After you have celebrated your engagement, take the time to sit down with your fiancé to discuss how the wedding will be paid for. If your parents are willing to help pay, also discuss with them what exactly they want to chip in on and figure out an estimate for how much that will cost.

While working out your budget, make sure to prioritize what is important to you for your wedding day. Do you want a large wedding? Are you most excited about intricate flower arrangements? Figuring out what you need in your wedding will help you allocate your money towards these items better during the planning process.

Enjoy your engagement

Although your wedding may seem like the most important thing in your life right now, it is still crucial to make sure you and your fiancé’s relationship does not become all about the wedding. Enjoy! You just got engaged and will start getting familiar with calling each other “fiancé” for a few months before the wedding planning begins. When you do start wedding planning, remember to set some time aside for yourselves where you continue to do the things you love, without much wedding talk to keep the process enjoyable.

Overwhelmingly the response we get from our couples was that having our planning services allowed them to do just that- they could enjoy their engagement because we took the guess work out of planning! If you’d like our expertise by your side during this important time in your life, we’d love to hear from you!

Again, congrats!