What is Reddit's opinion of A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

140 people for 12500 is going to be tough, at least where I live. It's not impossible, but you may have to adjust expectations for what it will include. At that price, you may need to do a backyard wedding, with light food options, and DIY most of the decorations.

Before you start booking things, though, you and your fiancee should iron out what is and isn't important to you. No one thinks they are "wedding crazy," but you'll be surprised at what you think "obviously" has to be a part of your wedding, and how it differs from your partner. A book that helped a lot in that process for us was A Practical Wedding -- it gives you a framework to discuss these things. How important is venue? flowers? attire? What would you sacrifice in order to have 140 guests? What would you sacrifice to ensure that you are under budget?

These conversations are huge, and help you and partner manage each other expectations throughout the process. Things said explicitly are always better than things assumed.

Additionally, it helps to talk to friends and family who have gotten married recently, at weddings you've attended that you've liked. You can ask them about planning strategies, vendors, even costs. People are generally willing to share that stuff. You can then get a better sense of what's possible -- perhaps you can get everything you want at the price you want. Perhaps there are tradeoffs that you realistically have to make, and now you can make them with open eyes.

As much as you need means very different things to different people. Are they offering 5k to have a small and modest celebration, or 50k to have a full blown professionally planned event? I think you need to have two conversations here.

The first is with your fiance, what do they want? Have they always imagined 150 guests and a 3 course meal and dancing on a weekend evening? Or would they prefer to elope in the woods with a few friends and family members present? Take budget out of it for a second and have a conversation between the two of you for what kind of wedding you'd be happy having, and how much control over it you want. If you both want a traditional wedding and are fine with ceding some control to their parents as they control the pursestrings, then that's a tentative plan. If you both really would prefer something non-traditional (again, budget notwithstanding), then plan for that. A practical wedding is a really great place to start on this one.

The second conversation, once you've decided on a rough vibe for what a wedding that would make you both happy looks like (estimate of guest count, general location or vibe), have a sit-down conversation with his parents and see what their expectations look like if they help fund this celebration, along with actual numbers for what as much as you need means. This conversation could be uncomfortable, but really illuminating and useful for how you approach this going forward.

As others have mentioned - eloping/courthouse for the legal bit followed by a non-wedding reception celebration with some friends and family at a restaurant in a big backyard is a fairly common alternative, especially in COVID times. There's still expenses there (feeding people is a deceptively huge expense), and you'd need to be okay with out of town guests possibly being less motivated to make the trip for something that's not a Wedding.

We're planning for September 3rd 2022 (labor day weekend), and in a similar boat (got engaged in March of this year, not a COVID-postponement). I'm also in graduate school in a HCOL/high demand wedding area as well. If you're flexible on dates (i.e. you just want a Friday or Saturday in around June) that can help. In my experience so far contacting vendors everyone has had availability for our date, with the exception of one DJ. But June is peak wedding season, and also closer than September, so you might run into more difficulty.

Once you have wedding vibe goals, rough size, and rough budget sorted out (I can't recommend A Practical Wedding enough as a starting point for these, I had it recommended to me and it's made this whole thing SO much easier), then it's time for venue. Sending out emails and getting rough quotes can help with budget formulation as well, the whole industry is so opaque that we just had no clue what a reasonable venue fee was for around our area.

More so than any other vendor, you need your venue to have availability on a date that works for both of you - they can usually only have one wedding a day, so they'll book faster than say a florist that can easily deliver flowers for 3 weddings on the same Saturday.

Many venues will let you put in a soft hold on a date (i.e. they won't book it out to other people without asking you if you want it first), so you can sort out if that's the venue you want. Getting those holds in can help lower anxiety around availability (it certainly did for me). From there we figured out photographer, since they also can only do one wedding a day, and photos are super important to me. We would have also prioritized catering at this point if the venue hadn't included it. From there you can tackle other important vendors (florist, DJ/band, etc.), but I felt a lot less stressed once we had our venue! Good luck :)

I'm not here to tell you not to have a wedding, or how much to spend. My own wedding ended up costing about $18,000 (about half covered by our parents) and I am ok with that because we were very thoughtful about how we spent that money. Nothing was purchased "because you have to have it." I really recommend you and your partner both reading A Practical Wedding. It helped foster a great conversation about what we wanted out of our wedding, what was important and what was not.

All that being said, guest list drives costs of pretty much everything and to me was the absolute hardest part of wedding planning.

The beginning was very difficult--trying to lock down ideas, a budget, guest list, and vendors... Then about two months before the wedding (when a things dependent on a timeline started rolling out), my stress kicked back into high gear.

I feel very lucky that I have a supportive family and bridal party, but FH just...doesn't. I'm kind of resentful on his behalf, tbh. Spending so much money (which we have) is also something I don't feel so great about. I tried to roll with punches and keep things low-key, but I can't help but feel like the ante has been upped hardcore. I'm afraid and stressed that expectations won't be met and somehow the day will be RUINED.

I get married on September 30, and I really, really, really wish we had just eloped. </vent>

But! You asked for advice. Here's what I'd recommend:

1. Choose a long engagement. This helps you plan and save $$.
2. Make a shared email account for you both to use and contact vendors.
3. Google sheets are your friend! Keep lists of people you've contacted, their quotes, etc. It's easy to forget since vendors won't get in touch ASAP, or some will be pushy, etc.
4. Prioritize early and often. Make decisions and move on.
5. Hire a coordinator. Ours was the best money we've spent this whole process.
6. Don't procrastinate!

I'd also recommend reading one of Meg Keene's books about wedding planning.

And finally...congratulations!

• Bask in the light of being newly engaged and enjoying everyone getting excited with us.
• Bought "A Practical Wedding" book and read it cover to cover in a sitting.
• I'm 16 months out, but started planning with FH on what kind of wedding he want
• Used costofwedding.com to figure out average cost of wedding and started setting a budget
• Figured out rough sketch of who our guest list is, approximately

We also started some of the planning stuff before we announced to everyone that we were engaged and I think we really needed to sit down and hash out some of the hopes and dreams we had about the wedding (the A Practical Wedding book was super helpful in this aspect) because we had some mismatch in our ideas. We both thought that the other wanted a much more traditional wedding than we actually wanted and we might have planned a different wedding that neither of us would have liked as much if we hadn't spent some time thinking and talking by ourselves with no family input before acting (and touring venues before paying).

If you've already had some really honest convos, great, if not, maybe you should take some time to luxuriate in being engaged and figuring out what you want before jumping the gun.

My future sister in law got us a bottle of champagne, a small cake to split, and bought me a bunch of bridal magazines - at that point I was so excited to get the magazines because planning was really just getting ideas and having fun with it. I'd get a few of those!

Now that I've been through the rigors of getting engaged and planning a wedding, I just bought the book version of A Practical Wedding for another friend who's temperament is similar to mine (see: is a fellow worrying introvert!)

I got a few wedding books and guides as gifts, mostly from the Knot, and while they were fun and helpful at first the timelines were kind of unrealistic and the budgeting pages, while there, just sort of assume you have $50k to drop on your wedding and want to do everything by the book. I wished I'd had a guide like A Practical Wedding earlier in the process!

PSA: Check your local library! I borrowed the kindle version of the original book for free and am picking up a copy of this wedding planner tomorrow.

Edit: Forgot to say that I am almost done with the original and love it so much that I am going back for the planner!

It's the first or second chapter in this book, which also includes plenty of actual wedding planning stuff.

That's the good thing about starting so early! You have so much time to start looking at alternative or unconventional options. For instance, something I have learned is that if you are looking to save some money you want to avoid "wedding venues", look for something that is used for several things. Think restaurants, breweries, parks, historic buildings, etc. Also, when looking at catering many times restaurants can be cheaper than professional caterers. When it comes to things like flowers, you can make your own paper flowers (I am doing this) or get them from the flea market, order them in bulk and DIY, there are so many options.

I highly recommend getting this book. It is great at explaining the options available and pulling you out of the wedding world where everything Must. Be. Perfect.

I think it's really important to spend a few weeks just soaking in being engaged. Talk a lot to your partner about what they want out of a wedding and figure out what you want. Probably he hasn't thought about what he wants as much as you have, but maybe he has. I really liked reading the A Practical Wedding book because it gave me a lot of perspective on the purpose of weddings and the bullshit of some so-called "traditions" that were invented by marketers. I read a lot of it out loud to my partner and we really changed our vision after talking about what we wanted it to be like.

Don't be in such a rush to plan that you plan the wedding you think you should want instead of the wedding you actually do want. It was really helpful to have a mission/vibe/concept of the wedding we wanted before we started to plan so that we could make choices based on "does this fit with our vision?" or "is this something we feel obligated to do?".

Also I highly recommend doing a pre-wedding mini-moon. We went a way for the weekend (stayed at a hotel a few miles from our house) about eight weeks before the wedding and didn't talk about wedding planning or work that needed to get done. It helped keep us sane in those last few months before the wedding.

Weddings used to be planned by mothers of the bride who had lots of experience planning and hosting social events. Nowadays, most often the bride plans the wedding with no experience whatsoever in planning large events.

I suggest the two of you take a few steps back, starting with defining a budget. Perhaps you have already done that. Then develop a guest list in several parts:

- the people who absolutely must be there with, and for you

-the next circle of guests you would like to have with you if money and venue allows

- the list of people your families have given you, but whom you have never met.

If the two of you are paying for your wedding, prepare a simple response to your parents' requests "I'm sorry, we can;t afford that." If they offer money, don't do anything or make any changes until the money is in your bank account.

Have an earnest conversation about what is important to the two of you for your wedding. You can host a smaller number of guests in a different manner than a lengthy guest list.

If he wants more guests, he has to come up with a way to host that number of guests. Often the solution will be changing the type of reception. You will be just as married with an early afternoon ceremony, followed by a cake and punch reception, as you would be with a plated dinner and dancing.

Other options would be mid morning wedding followed by brunch, booking a private dining room at a restaurant ( no charge for the room, only a food minimum ,that's what we did), or even booking out a favorite neighborhood pasta place).

Open Table has a list of restaurants with private dining rooms for many cities.

Consider venues that don't make a living hosting weddings: historical buidings, art galleries, museums, National, State, or Municipal Park buildings, your Alma Maters , a summer camp before or after the season,etc.

I cannot stress enough that this is a joint project. He doesn't get to keep extending the guest list and expect you to find some way to accommodate all the extra people.

Do you have a copy of https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155

If not, I suggest you start there.

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155

What about a wedding planner book? https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155 I've heard great things about this one.

Could go a little fun/silly and buy her one of those tumblers or mugs that say things like "Bride to Be" or "Does This Ring Make Me Look Engaged" or something.

Could also do one of those coupon books. "This Coupon is good for One (1) Hour of Wedding Planning Assistance" or "This Coupon is good for Fifty (50) Hand-Addressed Envelopes" or stuff like that?

This sub has a great 'just got engaged, where to start?' guide that I recommend reading through. I also recommend the book A Practical Wedding to basically anyone who's newly engaged, it was so helpful for my fiance and I to figure out what we wanted!

First, take a deep breath. Wedding planning is deeply stressful. I really can't recommend A Practical Wedding enough for where you're at. Before doing anything else, I think you two need to sit down and have a honest conversation about what is important to each of you in a wedding. Taking some time to actually talk through it with my fiance really helped us figure out what we wanted (for example, we started at 30 people max at a casual sunday brunch and ended up at 80 people on a saturday night, because we realized throwing a big dance party for all our friends was important to us). Figure out what you want before bringing budget into it. Do you want a big party for your whole community, or do you want a super intimate elopement/minimony with just a few close friends and family? What do you want to feel like on your wedding day? How do you want your guests to describe it?

Once you've made the big choices (wedding vs eloping, general size of invite list), then it's time to talk money. As others have said, budget varies massively on the type/timing of wedding, where you live, and the size of your guest list. The budget breakdown tab might be useful for you on this to see some examples. In HCOL areas (major cities usually), you can roughly expect something from 3k-9k for space rental and staffing alone, with plenty of examples higher than that. Obviously LCOL areas are going to be lower.

If you decide you want to move forward with a ~50-75 person wedding, now it's time to think about venues. In terms of being too much space on the one you like - talk to the venue coordinator. They might have examples of smaller weddings at the venue so you can see how they adapt spaces for smaller groups. It's hard to give more specific advice here without knowing the exact space.

As others have said, perfect is not possible with wedding planning - some things are compromises and others you just need to let go. You might slightly regret napkin colors, but as long as you don't regret your fiance, your wedding will be a happy memory and all the details will fade away.

p.s. pinterest and inspiration photos can be a curse. Many, if not most of those photos come from deeply unrealistic styled or weddings with truly huge budgets. Decide what 'nice enough' means to you and aim for that, not the for the most elaborate thing you've ever seen. Sometimes that means giving up on dumb things that feel weirdly important in the moment (mine was the color of the chair cushion of the chairs that come with the venue) but that I promise literally no one else will care about.

Congrats! Absolutely take a bit of time (a week or two) to soak it all up and enjoy being engaged before spreading the word more widely.

I really really recommend the book A Practical Wedding - it really helped my fiance and I figure out what was important to us, who we wanted present, and the kind of celebration we wanted to have. By making our priorities in advance for how we wanted the day to feel (convenient for and considerate of our largely out-of-town guest list, a fun boozy dance party, beautiful photos for memories), we were really able to set a lot of the other stuff based on those priorities (i.e. prioritizing a Saturday on a long weekend to make travel easier, an evening wedding with a full meal and open bar along with a killer DJ for fun vibes and dancing, and prioritizing a great photographer in our budget.

Setting those priorities also helped us figure out what was not important to us. As you go further into wedding planning, you can really get wrapped up in what the wedding industrial complex tells you that you must have at a wedding, and start thinking insane thoughts like 'do I need to rent chairs other than the gold chiavari the venue provides that have a white cushion instead of a black one?' (answer, no, absolutely not). We also talked through every wedding 'tradition' with each other and decided which to keep and which to cut or change.

I also really recommend setting big-picture goals for the wedding like about how many people you want be there and general vibes just between you and your fiance before talking to family. It's really easy to get steamrolled by familial expectations and end up with things or people you don't want - especially when you don't have things set in stone in advance!

As you go, you also might see your expectations for what a reasonable budget is get completely shattered (rip our initial 'we can for sure do this for under 15k' budget that's now a bit over 25k). We had that wiggle room in our finances, and decided we actually did want more people there and were willing to spend it. But I honestly think no one should go in debt for a wedding - so keeping budget, priorities, and goals in mind really can help keep things in perspective.

Good luck with all your planning pursuits!

The first step is breathe! Enjoy being engaged for a second first. Then, buy a copy of A Practical Wedding (I swear I'm not a shill, it's just an incredible book recommended to me that helped me a TON). Once you're over the original engagement excitement, sit down with your fiance and figure out how you want to feel at your wedding. Do you want a huge party with your whole community, and don't care if you're serving punch and cake? Do you want an intimate affair to splurge on a weekend away with a few close friends? What's the overall vibe you're going for? Figuring that out (and a rough guest count!) will help tremendously before tackling anything else. Planning a wedding for 30 people in a backyard is a wholly different set of stuff to figure out than 250 people in a hotel ballroom. Pinterest et al. wants you to start with colors and specific decor, but figuring out size and vibe is imho way more critical. The other stuff often flows from those choices (black tie with gold and black colors doesn't exactly fit a casual backyard brunch wedding, neither does burlap rustic in a 100 year old opulent ballroom).

Now for your specific questions, here's my two cents:

• Engagement photos are nice because you can use them for a bunch of wedding stuff (save the dates, wedding website, updating your social media profile pictures, etc.), but absolutely not necessary if you're on a budget - a friend with a nice camera or even a decent smartphone can get pictures reasonable enough for these uses. A lot of wedding photographers include them as a bonus if you book them for your wedding, or heavily discount those sessions. So if it's something you want, keep a lookout for photography packages that includes them!
• You super don't need to have bridesmaids. In fact you don't need to have anything, except your fiance and someone who can legally marry you. Lots of people are increasingly ditching the gendered, perfectly gender matched bridal parties. While it's still probably the most common thing, depending on your crowd they might either not bat an eye or raise an eyebrow (hyper conservative family from the country might not totally understand, but progressive folks from the big cities might). We're personally doing a shared, gender-free wedding party of our close friends with 'uneven' gender distributions, because we want our most important people around us for the big day, and don't really care. Some people really want picture balance, so that might be important to you. One thing to consider is it's often common for you to pay for some wedding expenses for the wedding party (hair and makeup is the big one, some brides even offer to pay for lodging or apparel although that's usually not 'standard'), so a big wedding party often ends up at bigger expenses.
• Out of state weddings aren't my area of expertise - but because of the pandemic, we haven't met any of our vendors in person, all of them (except venue) have been over zoom! Everyone is used to zoom meetings now, so the process for finding vendors in another state is likely a lot easier than it used to be. If you can swing a trip to the state you're getting married in and cram in some venue tours I might recommend that since that's the bit that's hard to get a feeling for online (or at least a friend in the area who can go snoop), and if there's room in your budget for a Day of Coordinator (DoC) that might be really useful to have boots on the ground who's used to the venue or the vendors. But if not, again, video calling/virtual walkthroughs are your friend!
• Most things flow out from venue, so if you're thinking about backyard wedding in a new house, you might want to focus on finding the right house (and yard) first! You have a lot of time right now but venues are filling up like crazy from all the built up 2020/2021 demand (we reserved our September 2022 venue this march, and they've already had to turn down others who inquired after us for the date). If you're looking at a really popular date (i.e. memorial day weekend or basically any Saturday afternoon/evening in May), venue stuff should be the first thing you're working out. Backyard weddings can save money, but there also can be a TON of hidden expenses depending on the vibe you want and guest count, so if it's mostly a money motivator it's worth stating those both out.

Congratulations on your engagement!

Check out this book:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0738215155/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_6bKhFbGRSW4T0

I also found my local wedding Facebook groups to be super helpful with location specific help.

Congrats and good luck!

I think by far the most important and priority decision is to decide your budget, then commit to planning within it.

Check out the website https://apracticalwedding.com/

and order their wedding planner

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155

It will walk you through the process, step by step.

For any who haven’t been warned off of wedding planning gifts (yikes)...both of the A Practical Wedding books!

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration

A Practical Wedding Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating the Wedding You Want with the Budget You've Got (without Losing Your Mind in the Process)

I thought this book was really interesting and helpful - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155

The book A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene!

I feel you. Have you checked out A Practical Wedding, either the website or the book? They're a great antidote to the wedding industry, and they have wonderful advice for cutting through all the BS and keeping your wedding about what really matters, your love and lifelong commitment to your partner.

Your wedding is just a party for you, your fiance, and the people you love most in the world. Wear what you want to wear. What's your everyday style? Do you like vintage rockabilly fit & flare dresses? Find one that makes you feel fabulous and rock it. Your dress doesn't have to be white, it doesn't have to be expensive, and it doesn't even have to be a dress. Wear whatever makes you feel like the best version of yourself.

Get the book A Practical Wedding!! It's the best wedding planning book and really helps if you are feeling overwhelmed.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155

If I may suggest a book (it's not very long) A Practical Wedding. http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155 Just like most wedding books this one goes through the wedding planning process but in a way to try and help you decide what you really think is important and what you don't want to have involved. There is also a website that the author started by the same name. http://apracticalwedding.com/ I hope that helps some to get your feet under you and decide what is best for you two.

Non-mobile: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738215155/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1430283856&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=a+practical+wedding&amp;pi=AC_SY200_QL40&amp;dpPl=1&amp;dpID=41FXlDjD5NL&amp;ref=plSrch

^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?

There is a really great book called "A Practical Wedding" available for $10 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Wedding-Affordable-Meaningful-Celebration/dp/0738215155 That starts from the basics of a wedding like the logistics but also has great advice for how to customize the wedding you and your FH want. There's also an accompanying blog: http://apracticalwedding.com/ That has short articles addressing common wedding stuff and providing options and ideas for every part of the wedding. As other wedditers have said, your budget and guest list determine pretty much everything. So sit down with your FH and determine how much y'all are willing to spend and whether parents will contribute, and decide who you have to have there. Don't be afraid to keep it small or simple or non-traditional. BY FAR, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING is to remember that your wedding is the sharing of your commitment to your FH and his to you with your friends and family. It's easy to get bogged down in the details trying to make it perfect or a certain way, but things will go wrong, you'll probably have to compromise, but y'all'll be married. So don't lose sight of that.

Congratulations!!! A Practical Wedding (the book and the site) offer great advice for planning a wedding while keeping everything authentic and reasonable. They helped me stay sane and put all the wedding magazines and blogs in perspective while planning my wedding. Their philosophy: the only things you need to get married are a willing partner (which you already have!), an officiant, and a marriage license if you want to make it legal. Everything else is optional.