The wedding planner in you is ready to be unleashed. If we hired a planner we wouldn't have been able to make the frugal choices we made and have the experience we had.

We were determined to get everything ourselves because our goal was to stick to saving money. We got a really good note book an prepared to keep good notes. My wife actually kept the notes because shes more organized than I am.

There will be a ton of categories to list such as, wedding flowers, wedding cake, bridesmaid dresses, hotel arrangements bridal registry, bridesmaid gifts, bridal jewelry, wedding flowers, wedding invitations, wedding music, wedding photos, wedding rings and that is the small list.

You'll modify it as you see fit. There are really good tools our there for planning. One such tool is a book called Fire Your Wedding Planner. The author is Stephi Stewart, and if what she says is true, her book is worth looking into.

If you believe you're good under pressure then you will become a very capable wedding planner. Once you've sat down and divided up your categories and how much you want to spend, stick to your guns and only spend that amount. Staying on budget is the key.

Take a look at Quicken's new online tools that tells you how much you can spend based on you budget. It's great for putting all of your finances in one spot to see the big picture. They have a 30 day free trial as well.

You might go over a little but the savings will be excellent. Every time we visited a vendor, whether it was for the cake, the flowers, the wedding dress, we kept good records.

Keeping good records is a crucial element to being successful. Write every thing down including your thoughts. You'll be glad you did. Your notes will help you to compare what each vendor price better.

Maybe you'll be able to convert your notes into a wedding book someday and read it to your grandchildren. How cool would that be. The story of you?

As you build your list, your ultimate goal is to time everything to be finished way before your wedding day of course. You might say well, that's pretty obvious but, it is a very crucial element to having everything run smoothly.

Checking your notes regularly will help to keep tabs on what needs to be done. Cross items off as you go. There's lot to do if you take it all on yourself. You may feel overwhelmed at times but keeping everything in front of you in a listed format will help keep your nerves calm.

The one thing we did not have access to was all of the fancy wedding planner software that's out today. We didn't even think about that option. If we were doing it over again, I would check to see if the software would work for us.

If you get overwhelmed with being the wedding planner, ask a really good friend to help you keep track of it all. Make sure it's someone who has qualities you like and won't take over the wedding. Your mom just might be the right answer, or not.

Just remember to have fun with it all so you can look back and enjoy the wedding memories you created. Happy Wedding!

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