So you are all excited at the start of planning your wedding day but you do not want to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a professional wedding planner. You are going to have to pay for certain things anyway and it can be a waste to have a middle person doing all the coordinating for you. They will charge you handsomely for their services.
Of course if you have no time and very few contacts it might actually be better if you did use a professional but that is up to you. I will assume that you have decided to do your own wedding planning. That decision made there is no shortage of excellent resources for you to use to help you plan your special day
You cannot do the food or the honeymoon for free but you can with a bit of skill and guile do your wedding planning for free. Here are a few ways to do this.
Using the internet to do your free wedding planning
The internet is becoming freer by the year and there are lots of free guides and e-books on wedding planning that you can download. There are also checklists and spreadsheets for you to follow to ensure nothing is missed out. To find these websites type in a phrase such as wedding plan or plan your wedding and you will get plenty of help.
Friends can help you plan your wedding but choose them well
Its time to call in a few favours and use your friends to help you plan the wedding. Make sure they are reliable and not prone to stupid ideas. It is not their wedding, it is yours and they need to remember that. When we planned our wedding (30 years ago) I chose my best friend to help. Now he is a born organiser and administrator so we had a fantastic day and the planning and delivery of our special day was second to none. No surprise I made him best man on the day.
Between us we gathered a small team who came up with how we wanted our day to be. We added things in and removed other bad ideas over 3 or 4 meetings in our home. All the implementation was shared out and we had a fantastic day. This cost us nothing other than a bit of time and some careful choosing of the right friends. If you have good friends they will want to help for free.
Use other people weddings as an idea resource for yours
Some weddings are memorable and others are downright dreadful. There is nothing remotely funny about a drunken groom on his wedding day. Think back to the weddings you have been to and try to define what it was that you liked about it. Was it the music, the greeters, the cars, the speeches? Copy ideas from other people. If you are worried they will think you copied the idea tell them what you plan to do. They will take it as a compliment that you are doing the same thing.
Use your own ideas carefully
Your wedding needs to be your own day with its own character. This is a great bonus for doing your own wedding planning. You can put in touches that no one else has thought of. But this can be a problem. Just because you think it is a nice romantic idea it doesn't mean it is a good idea. Horse drawn carriages are great but have you smelt the XXXX that comes out of the horses? Mixing the families might be right or could be disastrous. To overcome potential problems run the ideas past your small wedding planning team and listen. In the end your vote over rides all the others but other peoples input could stop a disaster.