Where to begin??

That is the question I had to ask myself almost immediately after getting engaged last month.  Who knew planning a wedding involved so much work?!

My fiancé left ten days after he proposed to finish his studies at UPenn, leaving me here in Bermuda to get this all together.  Since we only had just over a week together before he left, we spent much of it telling our families the good news, introducing our families, telling our best friends, and planning a small get together to celebrate.

Then came the hard part: figuring out how we can actually make this happen.  I've been pretty good about saving money over the past few years, so although paying for this thing myself is daunting, it's doable.  This of course comes with a caveat or two.  I refuse to take out any sort of loan to pay for a wedding.  Also, I would like to have some savings for us as a couple once we are married.  Having a nice wedding would be wonderful, but let's face it, I'm more concerned with having a nice marriage.

After looking at our situation, I decided I want to spend $10K on the wedding.  It's an arbitrary number of what I think is reasonable for a young couple paying for their own wedding, especially when one person is bearing the brunt of the cost and the other person still has school loans to pay off.  This number is flexible, but I want to see how much we can do for this amount of money.

We discussed when we would like to get married, and the answer was really as soon as possible.  My fiance is graduating at the end of May, so we were hoping to be married at the beginning of June.  What we didn't realize until last week is that my fiancé's brother will still be sitting his final exams until June 9, so that's out.  And it's looking like June will be written off completely because we have two other weddings to attend as well as my brother's graduation... so we are now looking at July 9 as a date to check with potential venues.

After brainstorming some potential venues, I contacted several for preliminary quotes to see what we could afford.  I am still waiting to hear back from some, and actually just thought of another last night, but I'll put a separate post about venues rather than going into it now.

The hardest part of this budget planning is going to be trimming the guest list.  It's the most effective way of cutting costs, but I feel as though I'll also be cutting ties.  More on that in a later post as well.

So I have to say, I feel a bit stuck at the moment.  Without a venue, I can't confirm the date.  Without a venue, I also can't say exactly how many people I will be able to invite to trim the guest list one final time.  And without the guest list, venue and date, I can't send out save the dates or book anything else really.  In the meantime, I've been hitting the books (okay, bridal magazines) and websites to get inspiration for decor and dresses (the fun stuff!).  Even then, I need an idea of the total cost for the ceremony and reception before I can see how much I have left to play with, or if my budget is a complete fantasy.