For the Big Day You Must Have a Budget

When I got engaged I was really short on ideas about weddings. I have not been dreaming about my wedding since I was a little girl, I only knew I wanted to get married and have children one day. Hey, I'm an engineer. We are not known for being creative or artsy. We are known for being organized. Strangely enough, when it comes to my wedding all my engineer-y organized-ness goes out the window. This really caused me quite a bit of stress in the beginning because, well, in a way I am pretty competitive and I really, really, really wanted my wedding to be awesome!!! But how was I supposed to do that, considering I did not already subscribe to Martha Stewart Weddings??? I didn't know where to start. So I went to the box of truth (as my bestie calls the computer with an internet connection) and I Googled it!

Google's Carnival 2012 Doodle. Source

Boy!!! I knew weddings were a huge deal but I had no clue how huge until I saw the multitude of pages of advice and examples and service offers. Floored! <--That was me. I couldn't choose which link to click first. So I closed the page and went straight to theknot.com. I had previously spent lots of time on the site reading articles about engagement rings and such. Mr. Fox had been overwhelmed with the task of asking me to marry him since I am American and he wanted to live up to my US requirements (story about that later). Of these I had no clue, but somehow in my searching I had asked the box of truth for help and found the knot. It's a great website for starting the flow of creative juices. They have useful things like an entire section on planning with links to every and anything that has to do with a wedding.

Off I went to Knot-tingham. After getting lost in the luscious photo galleries and "Top 10" lists (because I am an engineer who likes pretty things), I finally made my way back to the number one thing everyone needs to get started: the dreaded wedding budget. The knot has a nice, easy-reading article called "Wedding Budget 101". For novices like me, it helped to highlight the major categories involved in the wedding and their simple percentage breakdowns helped me to understand the relative importance of each. I used this as the baseline for the budget planning. Additionally, they have a section on Planning Basics which explains those major categories and the details they cover. Engineer-y organized-ness restored!

Since Mr. Fox and I will be paying for the wedding ourselves, I have to make a hard sell with every detail that he does not feel is necessary (and to him and his French sensibilities, the only necessities are good food and wine). Mr. Fox is a tough nut to crack, especially when money is involved, especially since we intend to follow our budget as closely as possible (the mantra of every Project Manager). He did not see the value in spending 10-12% of our total budget on a photographer. So ladies, if your fiance is anything like Mr. Fox, be prepared with real reasons why you NEED these things. Emotion does not move a man like Mr. Fox to spend his money. It was invaluable to find out what was important to Mr. Fox because he will feel included (and be interested!) in planning an event where most fiances tend to feel left out. And, to be honest, being forced to justify all the line items on the list really helped me to focus on what about the wedding is actually important to me and not get caught up in the hype of the wedding machine.

Do you have a fiance who is hard to convince? What did you find was most important to him?