Your wedding day is one of the most memorable and emotional milestone events in your life. It is filled with love, happiness, and celebration. However, behind all of the emotions is a day where you could have a ton of logistics, a timeline, vendors, and a hundred little decisions. Couples who want to save money tend to try their hand at DIY wedding planning, only to discover after the wedding that, in reality, not hiring a professional wedding planner often drives up the cost.
In this blog, we dive into the hidden costs of not hiring a professional wedding planner and why the fee a wedding planner charges might be the wisest investment for something so important to you.
One of the most frequent wedding planning mistakes couples make is selecting a vendor based solely on price. Lacking the industry knowledge or negotiation skills, you may end up with unreliable, expensive and/or unsuitable vendors based on your vision.
A comprehensive wedding planner helps you develop a trusted system of vendors that provide quality work and value. They know the vendors who show up on time, who charge hidden fees, and who have a history of canceling at the last minute. By avoiding bad hires, you are saving time, energy and money.
Couples tend to over-order if they do not have an expert to guide their choices or sometimes just panic buy at the 11th hour. What results can be an overspend on items like flowers, excess décor that is never used, and much more, so that by the end they find their DIY wedding planning quite significantly went over budget.
Weddings have many moving parts — the makeup artist, the photographer, the venue setup – there are many moving parts to coordinate. If timelines are not managed properly, you could run behind schedule resulting in overtime fees that are unfair and you shouldn’t have to be responsible for.
A professional wedding planner is a timelines wizard. They ensure every minute is a good use and every vendor is on the same page. Remember, saving an hour of overtime fees from a photographer, videographer, or venue staff can certainly justify hiring a wedding planner.
Let your wedding planning experience be a happy one, not a crazy one. But exhausting levels of emotional weariness are commonplace for couples heading the DIY wedding planning road. From late-night Pinterest pinning to constant vendor follow-up, wedding planning is basically a full-time job!
But the mental toll doesn’t just stop at an emotional level; it also will detract from your ability to work, your health, and your relationships! One of the biggest undervalued benefits of hiring a wedding planner is that it will help you have peace of mind. You will ultimately enjoy your engagement instead of just tolerating it!
Have you ever booked a vendor, assuming everything was included, only to find extra fees marked ‘optional’ or ‘additional’? Think travel fees, service charges, cancellation clauses, etc. First time planners can miss what is outlined in the fine print, causing unwanted costs after budget was allocated.
An experienced professional wedding planner understands how to read contracts, what questions to ask and how to negotiate the terms of service based on your needs. They have your best interests in mind, protect your budget, and help you avoid unnecessary fees.
Planners frequently develop strong connections with vendors and, in turn, are able to get you better deals or additional inclusions based on their relationship, brand loyalty, and the trust that’s been built. Those perks, which aren’t available to the average couple, can significantly lower the overall wedding planner cost and provide greater value.
If it is discounted décor rentals, upgraded catering package, or some other miscellaneous hidden savings, these opportunities can add up fast! Doing it yourself will not provide you that level of leverage.
Picture it: the florist drops off the wrong flowers. Or the sound system goes kaput minutes before your first dance. Who’s going to sort that out while you’re still in your gown?
This is where the advantages of hiring a wedding planner become really clear. They are troubleshooting in real time, communicating with vendors, and managing problems – on the fly – so that your event can have minimum hiccups. Without a planner, you most likely will need to ask your friends and family to step outside their guest role and step into a problem solver role. That typically leads to chaos, stress, and regret.
You have been envisioning this moment for months — choosing the chairs, lights, centerpieces — but if your team is running full behind on the day of the wedding, all of this very careful planning may not be recognized.
A professional wedding planner will make sure that all of the items you carefully selected will be under way before the guests begin to arrive., and, when we do this it allows you to get the most from your investment for what you imagined, rather than what was set up last minute.
At Amazing Weddings we believe that your only responsibility should be to celebrate love on your wedding day – not to coordinate all the details. With our end-to-end wedding planning services, we make your wedding day easy, elegant, and literally unforgettable.
We can help you dodge the most common wedding planning pitfalls by using experts who know what they’re doing and have experience to back it up. When you choose to hire a wedding planner, you’ll receive so much more than just a beautiful event — peace of mind, hidden savings, and you might just actually enjoy the celebration.