It sounds so wonderfully dreamy to delegate all the dirty work to someone else. Can you envision it? A chic lady will arrive on your doorstep, and in one fell swoop, she will find the perfect three-piece fusion jazz/funk/rock/hip-hop band that will both blow away the twentysomethings and appease the sixtysomethings; she will personally hand-address your invites; she will expertly mediate with both sets of parents; she will winningly prod your caterer to make exactly what you want for the same price as the low-budget pasta dish she was trying to pawn off; and then she will discreetly shampoo your carpet in her spare time. OK, it’s time to wake up and deal with the reality.

The best wedding planner is one part personal coach, one part contract negotiator, one part Best Friend Forever, one part fashion stylist, one part therapist, and one part researcher. You have to remember that you’re not hiring a personal assistant. You need to manage your expectations. What exactly can a wedding consultant or coordinator do for you? Here’s a realistic portrait of the tasks you can outsource in the best of all worlds:

The Detective Work: A good planner will know your local wedding industry like the back of her well-manicured hand. She’ll float into the best shops and be greeted with awe, respect, and special deals. A good planner can lead you to places you might not find in the phone book, bridal magazines, or the message boards you’ve been trolling for tips. She is clued in to the best secret services before you even make her acquaintance. Sure enough, the best of them act like a concierge at the Ritz; one fast flip through the old Rolodex reveals the perfect venue for you, and the contact information of the caterer who is listed nowhere.

The Dirty Work: Some of us couldn’t pay a high enough price just to have someone else read through the fine print. With weddings, there is plenty of it—because you will want to have contracts with all of your vendors, from the caterers to the florist. A planner, however demure he or she may appear, has plenty of stern looks behind that smile. To fight for your best interests and weed out any possible scam, she can go from sweet to scary in a matter of minutes. Bewildering contracts? No problem! Hidden add-on costs? Unearthed before you put your pen to the paper!

The Director’s Work: Coordinating a mass event is no minor feat; it requires someone with the skills of the most polished diplomat, and who can quietly but effectively make things happen while operating behind the scenes. With a wave of the hand, the flowers are delivered, the hairdresser is waiting when you arrive at the hotel, the band knows where to be and when and everyone’s lapel is perfectly crisp. The director frees you from all concern about even the smallest details, enabling you to focus solely on enjoying your big day, rather than on the fact that your bridesmaid’s dress is utterly wrinkled.

The Haggler’s Work: Although planners cost money, it can be argued that you will ultimately save more money using one than by not doing so. This is because a good planner will use her savvy and experience to negotiate the best deals for you. To start, a planner can help you come up with a budget that works for you, and then she can help you get the best prices to meet that budget. How? A well-connected planner knows instantly just who in the area is looking to promote his or her services or products and therefore may be willing to tack on booking incentives, like free upgrades or discounts. For example, she might be able to negotiate a free engagement photo from your photographer or an extra hour from your musicians.

The Therapist’s Work: A planner’s work is never done. When you find yourself meekly asking, “Is this normal?” you will have an ally who can tell you, “Yes, it is. Everyone feels frustrated, alienated, irritated, infuriated, or taken advantage of.” Let’s face it, you are Bride #4125 - so what may feel like a Crazy, Novel, Unique Experience is actually par for the course for this pro. That could be a good thing. Your last-minute zit? “Normal; try toothpaste,” she might suggest. Your mum’s last-minute freakout? “Normal; take a timeout and have tea to smooth things over,” she’ll offer. You start to freak yourself out: Is he the one? “Normal; have a romantic evening at home and rediscover why you’re doing this in the first place,” she’ll instruct.

Here are a couple of handy hints:

1. Only invite couples who live together or who are married. Eliminate the “plus one guest” unless you actually know the name of the guest.

2. Invite people whom you want to be a part of your future together, not necessarily people who were part of your past, which is to say, new friends may have more of a place at your wedding than some of your university friends, whom you may feel a vague obligation to invite.

All of this means that deciding on your guest list is one of the first - and most important - things you should do in planning your wedding, as this number is the single most important controllable factor in your wedding budget. Let’s say you’ve run the numbers and you want to invite roughly 90 people (thirty friends, thirty for the Groom’s family, and thirty for the Bride’s family).

Now bear in mind that it is highly unlikely that everyone you invite to your wedding will say yes. As a rule of thumb, approximately 20% of people you invite will politely decline, for one reason or another. The key to getting to the Magic Number of guests you want to be at your wedding is to successfully identify and remove from the list the people who cannot make it as early as possible in the whole process.

Let’s assume that dear old uncle Frank should be invited (he is family, after all) but you don’t really know him and he lives abroad, so he’s highly unlikely to come and you personally would not be too upset if he didn’t make it. You’d rather invite Dan, a guy you use to work with. But the family expects that you send Frank one of your precious invites! What do you do?

Answer: remove Frank from the list early by sending out Save The Date cards as soon as you’ve booked the venue! Save The Date cards are becoming increasingly more popular in the UK. They give information on the date and the venue. Once you have sent them out, you can follow up with the people who you suspect will not be able to make it. So you can call up uncle Frank once he has received his Save The Date card and get a confirmation from him that he will not make it (as you expected). You express regret, but now you don’t have to send him an invite. Instead, you can send out a Save The Date card to Dan - the first person on your reserve list.

Another idea is to explicitly state on the Save The Date card that people should let you know if they know now that they will not be able to make it for any reason (although there is no need to say yes for definite at this stage). This could eventually free up some more space from your 90 places from people who may have already booked holidays or who may have other prior engagements.

If you follow this process outlined above, you can increase the number of people who will accept the final invitations (when you send them out) into the high 90 percent range!

While you may have been hoping for a painless process, let’s face it, prioritizing friends, parents’ friends, and peripheral guests for your wedding is never going to be an easy task. You had might as well reconcile yourself now with the fact that you are going to upset some people – whether or not they voice their pain to you or keep it to themselves, some people are going to end up miffed. A classic example, of course, is when someone assumes that their invitation is “plus one” when – in fact - it is not. It is simply not possible to please all of the people all of the time.

As you plan your wedding, it’s important to remember that a small guest list will help to keep your costs down, right from the beginning. The fixed cost element of every wedding – e.g. the venue hire, the cars, the wedding dress etc. is not going to vary wildly with number of guests who attend. But the variable cost factor can send your budget through the roof. Put simply, more people = more plates = more tablecloths = more invites = more everything! And the prices add up really fast and can spiral out of control even more quickly!

This all may seem obvious in the abstract sense, but the costs carry over in unlikely ways. For example, how many additional people do you have to invite before you have to add a whole extra table (and other people to fill it up) so that people aren’t sitting by themselves? Adding four more people could require setting up a new table, with an additional set of rental items: another centerpiece, another tablecloth and yet more chairs. All told, eliminating twenty “non-essential” people could save you hundreds, if not thousands of pounds from your budget.

…is big business! Every year in the UK, about 275,000 couples get married. With the average cost of wedding in the UK (including engagement party, rings and the honeymoon) estimated to be about £17,000, that puts the UK wedding industry alone worth more than a staggering £4.5 Billion per year!

But a successful wedding does not have to be an expensive wedding!

After all, it’s not the price of the wedding that will determine the quality of your marriage. A successful wedding is one where the bride, groom and the guests enjoy themselves. Everyone has a budget in mind when planning a wedding and sticking to the budget does not necessarily mean having to give up on style or the fond memories. It just takes some planning and shopping around.

The bottom line is weddings are expensive if you want them to be. Most new couples would prefer to save some money on the day itself to keep some back for the honeymoon or a deposit on a new house. All you need is a little imagination and some help from friends and family and you too can have a luxury wedding with all the trimmings, but at a price that’s right.

As we mentioned before, we’ve been busily putting together our wedding cost saving “package”.

It’s essentially a product to help people reduce their wedding costs without compromising on quality. It’s split into 10 video modules (which you can watch from your computer at any time, day or night)… that works out as almost 3 hours worth of high-quality content.

It’s almost ready - we’re just doing some final market testing on it and we’d like to get your input.

Here is the detailed information page:

http://www.SmartWeddingSecrets.co.uk/cheap-wedding-package.php

Please check it out and leave us a comment or question using the form below… we really do want to hear your honest (constructive) feedback.

Cheers,

Karen & Martin