New to the forum and new to planning a wedding

Congratulations and welcome, Taylor! Make sure you change your picture when you get a chance! You can do this on a desktop under "My Profile" and "Profile and Privacy Settings".

The very first thing you want to do is come up with a budget. Then create your guest list. Then you can find a venue that accommodates your guest list and that you can afford!

^ great starting point. Budget is everything. You can Google search different budget worksheets where you calculate what you're going to be able to save and then disperse that into different categories. One of my worksheets even gives me an average percentage next to the section (like 2-4% of budget gets spent on stationary, x% on dress, etc) and then another column to keep track of actual expenses as I go.

Next I started a binder and organized it to my personal preferences. It was a necessity for me to keep all my information organized.

Since I'm still 1.5 years out to our wedding day and we can't go home to the west coast to tour venue locations until the end of summer, I started with little things that I could do now (i.e. I've known for years what our wedding colors and theme would be, and we are diy our invites so I have used coupons to buy the stationary we need, organizing photos we are going to use in the slideshow so people have something to help occupy their time during the cocktail hour while we are getting photos done, researching vendors like mad so I've got a game plan when we go home to meet with them, drafting guest lists and bridal party lists that we've been trimming back the last few weeks because we realized we can't afford that many guests, lol).

Budget, guest list estimate, and start search for venues.

I was a little OCD and called vendors to get an idea of what things cost. That's how I started to determine our budget, plus we based it off our incomes. The photographer is one of the vendors I searched for super early. I noticed those tend to get booked up early, along with the venues.

Www.CostOfWedding.com can give you an idea of costs in your area.

Congrats and welcome to WW Taylor!!

Definitely get started with your budget, guest list, and venue! The WW checklist is also great for keeping you on track and showing you what is next! With planning just make sure to take one thing at a time and don't overwhelm yourself with a million details, just tackle the next thing on the list

Thank you all so much. This will help a lot. I'm still trying to figure out WW and all the things it can do for me. I'm literally on it everyday to try and get more familiar with it so I can use it better. Thank you all again!

Please remember-- once you have a license, officiant, and two people who want to get married, *nothing* will make you more married. If you hold this firmly in mind, you are less likely to get sucked into the STDs, chair covers, welcome bags, etc., etc., etc. It'll save you money, time, and anxiety.

STDS means "save the dates" here, by the way lol.

Don't want you to get concerned that everyone here has STDS like I did when I first got here!

Thank you for that bit of advice Zoe M. That is something good to really keep in mind. Yeah I saw STD's and was like ?? So thank you for clearing that up haha I'm still learning what all of these mean.

FH = future husband. That's on nearly every post, haha.

Everyone else has covered what I was going to say, but definitely use the checklist on here. It helps you stay on track for planning!

Congratulations and welcome to WW, happy planning. I hope you have fun and receive good advice on planning your wedding I know I have just by reading the threads. I found pinterest to be very helpful with planning a wedding along with WW.

Congratulations and welcome!! Here's the link to help you with the lingo: https://support.weddingwire.com/hc/en-us/articles/205672809-WeddingWire-Community-Lingo

My sister got me the "Budget Savvy Wedding Planner" by Jessica Bishop. It (and theses forums) are really helpful!!