Start early and set priorities
If you want a stress-free wedding, it’s best to start as early as possible with your planning, ideally around a year before the wedding itself. This gives you the time you need to research all the different elements that you’ll want to come together and to get ideas about costs without feeling rushed and having to make quick decisions that you might come to regret.
Once you’ve worked out the date for the wedding, you can start to think about your priorities—what do you definitely want? It could be a specific venue, a certain type of food, a particular dressmaker, and so on. Perhaps there’s a Cancun wedding photographer that you can’t imagine not hiring. You’ll be able to make decisions much more easily if you know what you really want.
Create a realistic budget
If there’s one thing that’s going to cause a problem with your plans, it’s your budget. It’s so easy to get carried away and spend too much, meaning that you have to borrow more money or skip some of the things that you really wanted at your wedding. It’s therefore crucial to make a realistic budget at the start and stick to it— this way, you’ll know what you can afford, and you won’t have to be disappointed.
Remember as well that unexpected costs can arise, so it’s a good idea to have a contingency fund just in case. If you don’t use it, perhaps you can add it to your honeymoon spending money or even just keep it safe for a rainy day, but it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Be flexible
Something else that will make wedding planning more fun and less stressful is being flexible. As much as you might hope that it doesn’t happen, and as well-planned as everything might seem, there could be things that crop up that will challenge you or cause issues, and if you’re not flexible about them, they can be hugely stressful.
You’ll have things that you really won’t want to change, like the venue or the caterers you’re hoping to use, for example, but what about everything else? Could you pick a different dress or flowers? Could you opt for a smaller cake or something altogether different, like donuts, if the cake you wanted isn’t possible? If you’re willing to make changes that still fit with your original vision, the whole thing will still be great and less stressful as a whole.
Of course, you shouldn’t compromise on something if it means you’ll be unhappy and have regrets, so there has to be a balance – make sure you’re planning your wedding the way you want and not just making do with what you can get.