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ALL TOPICS | Planning Questions

Q: I can’t afford a wedding planner, what other options are there?

VIDEO SUMMARY

So you think you can’t afford a wedding planner, but let me ask you this. When was the last time that you did something for the first time and you were good at it, right? Even if this is your second or even third time getting married, right? There are some things that can fall through the cracks. And as a wedding planner, I am telling you this because I started a wedding planning company, because when I got married and my co owners got married, we did not have wedding planners. And there were some things that got missed and we wished went differently if we would have just had a good wedding planner. Now as planners, now we have couples that have $5,000 budgets or $10,000 budgets and still have a decent guest size, and they are hiring us at $1,500, $3,000, $5,000. And that’s picking up that portion of their budget because the value is so great. Like a good wedding planner will actually save you money and will save you an incredible amount of time and stress. That being said, if there is no way that you can figure out how to factor in a wedding planner to help with your day, there are resources that you can get. I would do a ton of research online, download all the lists that you can download, ask everyone you know who’s been married, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they wish would have gone differently, what ran smoothly, and just get as much experience from them as you can. There’s a lot of online resources. There are Facebook groups now where brides are asking each other if they can be guests to each other’s weddings and make new friends. And you can go to this event and kind of get that feel for how a wedding flows. Even just getting to one or two weddings before your event is going to be a massive help. Shameless Plug if you absolutely can’t hire a wedding planner and you know that you need help, we created an e journal that is specifically geared to get you all of the knowledge that a wedding planner would have so that you know which questions to ask. So this isn’t your normal journal where it’s like, put your bridal party here and put your vendors here. This is 55 pages of questions that we would ask you if we were your wedding planner to make you think about every single aspect of the day that needs to happen. And hopefully we’ll give you the knowledge that you need to plan your day and make sure that none of the snafus that typically happen, right? So if you’re interested in that, it’s called winning your wedding planning. It’s that best weddingplanningjournal.com, and I hope that you check it out. Whatever happens, my number one piece of advice that I give to every couple is get a wedding planner. But I hope that you find the solution that works for you and that your day runs super smoothly.

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Featured Question

Q: Is there really a wedding mark up?

Do you feel like the industry charges more “because it’s a wedding” and they know it’s an emotional purchase?

Do companies think that they can charge more for weddings since the bride and groom may be willing to spend more on their dream wedding?

Hey wedding pros – is this higher price tag justified? Why? Do you charge more for your service if it is a wedding?

This is a taboo topic, whispered but not discussed… until now.

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2 comments

    Robin Sloan, The Uncorked ProjectVerifiedRobin Sloan, The Uncorked Project

    I have been asked this so many times... does the wedding industry inflate prices when they hear it's a wedding?

    Here is my honest answer (as a former wedding photographer)... NO. Did I charge more for a wedding than a 50th birthday party or a family portrait session? Yes, absolutely. I charged A LOT more for a wedding.

    Was I taking advantage of the emotional sell? Absolutely not.

    The main reasons I charged more for a wedding were: the unseen amount of work involved in the 12+ months leading up to the wedding, the skill level needed on the day, the INTENSE pressure to create perfect "portfolio level work" no matter what the reality of the situation- but mostly it is to compensate for the time AFTER the wedding in post production.

    Little known fact about wedding photography - the real job is sitting at a computer editing photos. Photographers spend many hours behind the computer carefully selecting and editing photos. They make adjustments, crop, and adjust colors to ensure each image it's best. Don't forget the time it takes for batching, renaming, importing, exporting and uploading the photos and preparing them for delivery.

    Do you think this justifies why photographers charge more for weddings than for other types of shoots?

    AvatarCody Pettengill

    Couldn’t agree more! And on the videography side its an absolute ton of data + editing discipline.

    Its a double sided coin- weddings are extremely high pressure but also high reward when we nail it.

    Our products (photo video) in particular are the only thing that genuinely will last forever . Having fun and ALSO nailing the product is worth the price of entry and frankly more.

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