For more financial budget saving strategies check out our friend’s blog (recently added to our blog roll): http://savvysaver.blogspot.com/
There you will find helpful wedding budgeting ideas and budgeting ideas for daily life.
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for September, 2006
Please give us your feedback
The weekend is finally here. It has been a long week and we are both very tired. Lisa has been busy with her chemistry assignments and Tim has been busy with work and developing the website.
We are excited about increased opportunities to share our experience and advice for the wedding planner on a tight budget. We hope you are too.
Will you do us a huge favor and post your comments about this blog and our website? You can post your comment to this blog entry or send your comment via the comment form at our website.
We appreciate your feedback. A big THANK YOU from the both of us!
Wine and Cheese
Well, last night we continued our anniversary celebrations with two movies, a bottle of white wine, cheese cake, and lots of cuddling. It doesn’t get better than that!
These three foundational years of our marriage promise a long happy life together.
We have based our relationship from the very beginning – even before we started dating – on the principles of unconditional love. Unconditional love is all about loving one another and accepting one another no matter what – warts and all! This kind of love is not based on what you do – but who you are. Let us say that again: Not what you do; but who you are!
We love each other and want the best for one another and always remember that our mate is a special person of divine origins.
If we could give just one piece of advice it would be to learn how to unconditionally love and respect one another for who they are. If you both make unconditional love the basis of your relationship, you will have a very long, happy life together.
Our 3rd Wedding Anniversary!
Today is our wedding anniversary! We have been celebrating it all day long. This morning, Tim surprised Lisa with an anniversary card and a big chocolate chip cookie, for lunch we went to our favorite restaurant — Yokahama with fabulous Japanese tempura. If you are ever in the Fort Wayne, IN area, definitely give Yokahama a try!
Tonight, for dinner, we will go to a little Italian place where we will share a plate of spaghetti and have a piece – or two – of cheese cake. Mmmmm.
It just occured to me that each aspect of our anniversary celebration is laced with smart budget buying:
card — 99¢ card with sweet message hand penned inside
lunch — cut the dinner cost in half by eating there at lunch time instead of dinner time (same food for much lower price)
dinner — instead of ordering too much, we will share a plate of spaghetti and have room for dessert — trust us, we will be full!
We are on MySpace!
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If you have a MySpace account, we hope that you will add us to your friends list and visit our MySpace site.
Our MySpace url is http://www.myspace.com/weddingplanningonabudget
Make Your Tight Wedding Budget Your Greatest Asset!
We have just written an article that will be picked up by various wedding magazines and websites. As a subscriber to our blog, you get to hear it first! Here is the article in its entirety:
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Make Your Tight Wedding Budget Your Greatest Asset!
-by Tim and Lisa Spooner
www.weddingplanningonabudget.com
© Tim and Lisa Spooner
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Tight wedding budget got you down? We know what you mean! As planners of our own beautiful wedding on a budget of just $2,000, we understand the challenges facing you.
Planning a wedding on a tight budget need not tie your stomach up in knots. In fact, your tight budget can make your wedding truly remarkable!
Do you want to know how to make your tight budget a major ally instead of your adversary? How would you like to stop hating your budget restrictions and start appreciating the advantages you have over other wedding planners?
To know this freedom, you need to know the positives to planning your wedding on a tight budget. Then, simply make the choice to major on those positives to achieve the wonderful wedding of your dreams. Focusing on the helpful aspects of your budget will lead you to the amazing side benefits that you never knew accompanied your wedding budget.
In this article, we look at several of the great assets your tight budget can give your wedding planning.
Right at the top of the list we find the value of increased creativity that comes with your tight budget. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. The needy wedding planner discovers her inventive, creative wedding planning skills. Your wedding will not turn out like another “cookie cutter†wedding. Instead, your budget will force you to think outside of the airtight box that suffocates most weddings.
So go ahead and let those creative juices flow! Instead of planning an ordinary wedding, plan an extraordinary wedding!
As a wedding planner who must abide by a tight budget, you will not find yourself ordering straight out of the wedding catalog. Instead of simply ordering a pre-made, one-size-fits-all wedding, you will choose to piece together a wedding that truly reflects your personality. Your wedding will truly be YOUR wedding!
Relax, let your hair down! Allow your personality to permeate your wedding planning. Welcome to your wedding! Traditions and magazines know about weddings in general but they don’t know about your wedding!
As a wedding planner on a strict budget, you will have good reason to rely on your family and friends for support. Instead of simply plopping down a chunk of change and letting the professionals handle everything for you, you will benefit from working with your family and friends to bring your wedding dreams into reality.
Every wedding event requires a community for its success. Your budget will help you keep your community involved all the way through the planning process to your wedding day! With your friends and family involved in your wedding planning, you will find your wedding to be extra special to you and your community.
Since you cannot afford the fees charged by the professionals, you carefully plan your event to reflect your personality and keep your family involved. You also put lots of your own creativity into the wedding. Your creativity, personality, and community all infuse themselves into your wedding planning and two more advantages emerge from your tight budget…
A sense of ownership pervades your planning experience. Your wedding really feels like your wedding to you since you created it and poured yourself into it. Your sense of ownership will in turn produce a great sense of satisfaction in you as you realize that you created a great master piece – your wedding day.
In the end, your budget can help produce for your wedding these five assets: creativity, personality, community, ownership, and satisfaction. By focusing on these five positives, your budget will take its place among your most powerful wedding planning aids. You must live with your budget limitations anyway… Why fight it? Let your budget work for you!
Look on the web and you will find many helpful resources out there, such as our blog and book, just waiting to help you make your wedding budget work for you. Do not settle for anything less than the beautiful wedding of your dreams!
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Tim and Lisa Spooner, authors of Wedding Planning on a Budget, write a syndicated blog and provide helpful resources for the wedding planner on a tight budget at their website www.weddingplanningonabudget.com
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How many cake layers does it take to have the wedding of your dreams?
What if the wedding of your dreams isn’t the wedding you REALLY want? To put it another way, growing up you imagine all these things about your wedding which fall into two categories:
1) Physical aspects of your wedding
2) Emotional aspects of your wedding
In your mind as a child, it was difficult to separate those two aspects and now that you are an adult separating the physical from the emotional may not have occurred to you.
You see, in the end, it is the emotional aspects of the wedding and the ultimate goals of your wedding that actually matter.
Does it really matter, for instance, if you have a 10-layer, 5-layer, 2-layer, or 1-layer cake as long as on your wedding day you feel a rush of joy and happiness and love as you and your lifemate celebrate your choice to spend your lives together? Who cares how many layers the cake has as long as your wedding day is sweet and your new life together is even sweeter!
Wedding Gift Registries
The wedding and setting up house are two very expensive lifetime transitions. The good news is that we don’t have to go through these transitions alone. By signing up with a gift registry and letting your friends and family members know, you allow your friends and family — your community — to have an active part in financially supporting you as you make this expensive change in your life.
Especially if you will be setting up a new home together, you should definitely register with a gift registry and have a bridal shower and a wedding reception — the two key opportunities for your friends and family members to give you gifts!
To avoid people doing their own thing (which can lead to receiving 15 duplicate mixing bowls or an oddball item you would never use), make sure that they know where you are registered and make sure that it is a place that they are likely to shop at. If you live in a medium to large size city, you should register at a place with various locations in the city. Also, if any of your guests are from out of town, make sure you register with a nation-wide chain of stores. You can include your registration information with your bidal shower and wedding invitations.
You should do your guests a favor and choose reasonably priced items.
Gift registries are great. They make it possible for everyone to get you exactly what you need — it’s like a Christmas list for engaged couples.
If you want to save money, then make the most of your wedding registry. Encourage your guests to help you out by purchasing off your registry list.
When your friends and family want a say…
Planning a wedding is truly a social event — almost as social as the event itself!
When planning your wedding, do not be astonished that everyone wants to have a say on your wedding planning. Although it is tempting to say “Bug off! This is my wedding and I’ll plan it the way I want it!” we encourage you to make your wedding uniquely yours in a more valuable way:
Encourage the input! It sounds backwards, but by encouraging everyone to give you their ideas and input, your wedding can become even more uniquely yours!
Here is how it works: You encourage your family and friends to share their ideas with you — trust us it won’t take much prompting on your part! REALLY listen to their ideas. Make them feel that they are a part of your team by respecting their ideas – and most of all respecting them! Show how much you value their idea by asking for more of their thoughts and reasons behind that idea. Ask them why they are suggesting so and so. Let them know what you had in mind and your reasons (without being defensive) and ask them what they think about that.
Hint: This strategy works best if you are not easily offended when people suggest they have a better idea. Try not to defend your ideas. Just see if you can better understand their ideas and better understand your own ideas through their eyes.
Let your friend or family member become excited about your wedding! This is best accomplished by making them feel that they are valuable contributors to your wedding planning. Hint: Excited family members and friends are helpful family members and friends.
Let your friend or family member know that you are looking at a number of ideas at this point and are not ready to commit to any particular idea yet. You will keep their idea in mind and seriously consider it along with the various other ideas you are being offered by various sources.
Let this person know that you do appreciate their ideas and input. You welcome any more thoughts they might have on that or other ideas.
In the end, you have final say – and that can go without saying. The very fact that this person is approaching you with their wedding planning idea is an indication that they realize it needs approved by you to make it into the wedding. No need to rub anyone’s nose in this little fact.
Now, here is where the payoff comes into play: Since you have encouraged rather than discouraged feedback, these people will feel valued — very important! and keep coming back to you with their suggestions and be anxious to help you with your wedding planning.
Some of their ideas will be incredibly helpful and you will wonder why you didn’t think of them — they will be unique, which will make your wedding special and soo YOU!
Also, when people suggest an idea that doesn’t gel with one of your own ideas and you choose to respectfully and patiently hear them out, you may realize a way to improve your own idea or some compromise that may at first seem weird but in the end will seem special, unique and, in a word, YOU!
It is great that you are visiting advice columns like this blog, but don’t forget the advice available right at home!
Enjoy Your Wedding Day!
Wedding planning is a lot of work but it is so worth it! On that magical day, you will finally be able to display for all the world to see your overflowing love for one another. There is nothing more precious than the moment when the bride and groom with dancing eyes come nearer and nearer to one another as the bride in all of her glory comes down the aisle approaching her lover.
This special moment is a beautiful gift that you can give one another on your wedding day. Your family and friends will be glad that you shared this magical moment with them.
We were at our friends’ wedding recently and it was so special. The bride and groom made no attempt to hide their incredible love for one another. Their love sparkled with the refreshing simplicity of morning dew drops reflecting the sun with each smile and laugh and joyous twinkle of their eyes as they publicly made a lifelong commitment to one another.
What was most refreshing was that they were very relaxed and felt at ease to express their love and overflowing joy.
On your wedding day, relax and have fun! The planning is over and now you can sit back and enjoy this special day in your life.
After all, what is the point of a wedding if you cannot enjoy it? Plan your wedding day such that you have as few responsibilities as possible. Enjoy and have the time of your life — fully relish the excitment and magnificence of this day dedicated to your new life built on love, respect, and a commitment to always be there for one another.
Tired of the Same Old, Same Old Ceremony
There are some weddings that are so stereotypical of weddings and so cut and paste that you leave thinking, “Once you have seen one wedding, you have seen a thousand.”
You know exactly what to expect and you are not let down – unless you were hoping for something extra!
Do your guests and yourself a service: Make your wedding unique!
Get out of the “I’m planning a wedding mentality!” When you think of it as planning a wedding, you lock your mind into a box of expectations and set patterns. Sometimes wedding planners find themselves in a box that is so rigid and airtight that their creativity and ultimately their wedding is suffocated.
Try thinking of it as an event where you want to announce to your audience in a dramatic way your love and commitment to each other. Also, think of it as a party celebrating that love and commitment. Hey, be creative! Add your unique “couple personality” into it!
When we got married, we both hated long wedding ceremonies — honestly, there really are some wedding ceremonies out there that can be, quite frankly, tedious!
So, we carefully planned our ceremony so that it would be no longer than 20 minutes. We even helped the minister write the ceremony to make sure it was concise and powerfully reflected our love and commitment to one another. We also wrote our own vows for the same reason.
To top it all off, we performed “I Will Be Here” by Steven Curtis Chapman as a duet singing the words of commitment to one another.
It was a very special, powerful and succinct ceremony — and our guests loved us for it!
Oh, and here is a little secret for you wedding planners conscientious of the budget: The further you move away from the traditional, stereotypical wedding, the easier it can be to save money. You will be freed up to plan the day such that it effectively accomplishes all of your goals while staying on the budget you have set.
So there you have it: Avoid the Same Old, Same Old – Give your guests a special treat – and Take it easy on your budget all at the same time!
A Stack of Resources for the Budget Wedding Planner
The wedding of your dreams is perhaps the biggest event you have ever attempted to plan. You know that in the oceans of information available on the world wide web, there are the answers you need but one can only swim so much of the ocean by her or himself without becoming exhausted.
Here is the answer you have been secretly wishing for . . . Did you know that there are highly qualified people with insider information who specialize in gathering the expertise and guidance you need and presenting all the most helpful pieces of information in easy, user-friendly guides pertaining to particular needs? These guides will save you days and days of sifting through the world wide web. You no longer will feel like a speculator in the gold rush days panning endlessly with only a few grains of gold dust to show for it.
We have searched the web exhaustively to gather some of the best of these resources pertaining to planning a wedding on a budget. You will have to pay a small service fee for the informational guide or tool you choose but it is SO worth it! These guides and tools are a lifesaver and they are all guaranteed!
There is no need to search the whole width and depth of the world wide web. Give your search engine a break and visit just one page for a list of the most helpful budget wedding planning tools: See the List!(see left hand sidebar)
Visit our friends at WedAlert — great blog
We strive with each post to address pertinent issues concerning planning a wedding on a budget.
For more generalized wedding planning advice, visit our friends at WedAlert. They have a very popular wedding planning blog — and for good reason! They have recently posted two blogs on the issue of families and future-in-laws — a must read if you ask me. Search their archives and stay posted for a lot of helpful advice, information, and tips on planning a wedding.
Scary? . . . No Way!
If the mere mention of the word “budget” makes your hands clammy and puts a look of terror on your face, you are not alone!
Do not fear! Tim and Lisa are here to help you better understand the term “budget.”
Like other techy words, the word “budget” can result in confusion and dread.
Here is a not-so-scary definition of a budget:
A budget is the limit to money that you are allowing yourself to spend on a goal and your plan for reaching that goal on the monetary allowance you have given yourself.
Instead of thinking of a budget as scary, try thinking of it as a game, a puzzle, or a fun challenge.
When we planned our wedding on a budget of just $2,000, we thought of it as a game:
First, we set the rules of the game:
Plan the wedding of our dreams without spending any more than $2,000.
Then, we set out to develop our strategy for accomplishing the goals of the game.
We were very successful and had over a hundred dollars left in our budget on the day of the beautiful wedding of our dreams!
We realized that our strategy would work for anyone who wants to apply it so we wrote a book to help other engaged couples reach their goals of planning a wedding on a budget.
We have set up a website for our book. If you aren’t already there, go ahead and check the website out at www.weddingplanningonabudget.com