Where do I begin?
With money – the thing none of us loooovvvee to talk about (at least, I don’t.)  But the first step to planning a wedding should be determining how much money you have to spend.  This is a line I’ve told clients over and over through the years, but shortly after our proposal (as friends and family are asking if it’s planned yet) I found myself going the wrong direction.  If you begin planning before you have a budget in place it’s really easy for things to get out of hand and for you to get entirely off track.  I’m now speaking from experience.  Even though I knew to start with a budget, I’ve been planning weddings for other people for ten years, I was SO excited to start planning my own, so I jumped in before I was ready.  Luckily, I very quickly realized that things were headed down a financial path I didn’t want to go down, so I pressed pause on all communication with vendors and went back to gather a budget.