Getting married next year? Here’s what you need to do now

Winter is great for so many things. 

Soul food, snow, those seasonal hot drinks that Starbucks cooks up every year, and also one other very important thing: Planning your spring or summer wedding because as much as the idea of a winter wedding sounds nice, in Britain that’s not likely going to be as picture-perfect as the Czech Republic for example. With us, it’s more rain and sleet than powdery soft snow – not a great look on your photographs.

So even though the summer might seem a long way from here, trust us when we say – it isn’t, and there are a few things that could start planning so long, right now.

Start early, plan early

We’re going to say it, we’re sorry but we have to: failing to plan, is planning to fail and with something as important as your wedding day, you simply cannot start planning too early. You’ll find that with weddings, the law of unintended consequences is going to be teasing you with every opportunity, so before you start thinking about anything else – start, with a plan. You can find some cool templates, here.

Next, get your finances in check

Once you have an overall idea of what you want your wedding to look like, you can attach a pound value to that image. Remember to include a 10% ‘contingency’ of whatever the projected final number is going to be. Now, this doesn’t mean that you get to spend that money, it means that you have it to spend if you need it. Here’s an incentive, if you don’t use your contingency – you’ll have a much nicer honeymoon.

If your wedding is projected to take place in July, you effectively have five months of saving, so between you and your partner, you may want to look at ideas to boost your income over this time, reduce unnecessary spending and call time on excessive entertaining.

Location, location, location

If you have not found a wedding venue yet, you’re probably too late. It’s time to get cracking because all of the most popular sites are booked for months, sometimes a year or two in advance, so use those cold nights at home to search the web for your top 5 favourite venues. NO more than that, or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

Covid preparation

You’re probably going to be having a Covid wedding, at least in some shape or form, so it’s already a good idea to start sussing out how you think that this will have an impact on your wedding, your guest list and your venue.

You will generate a solid amount of work from just focusing on these few points in this post, so you want to get busy as soon as you can. As you start working through the individual requirements of each of these functions, you’re going to discover new tasks and issues and this is going to keep you busy over the next few months, so – remember to keep a living list of to-do lists and functions that you will add to it as you go on. Revisit this list regularly and start allocating tasks to appropriate columns and months.

Enjoy every moment! This day is one of the most significant you’ll ever have in your life so don’t get so wound up by the details that you forget to have fun.