As a career-long professional within the wedding industry, I can tell you there are plenty of well-kept secrets in our line of work, and today, I’m going to share 4 of them with you that you can use to your benefit.

Secret #1: The BEST weddings are planned with great detail

It’s true. The better you plan your wedding day and the more details you have to share with wedding vendors, the smoother things will go and the better your wedding day will be.

I want you to think of your wedding as an orchestra. Without having a good wedding planner or manager, your wedding could easily detail into a disaster.

The more information that you can provide to vendors, such as a detailed timeline and online Zoom meetings with them, the better they will be at their jobs.

I’ve seen so many weddings over the years where a bride didn’t have a planner or didn’t have a timeline at all and things just took too long to happen or things got skipped in the process.

At a very minimum, we recommend having a well-detailed wedding timeline, if you don’t know how to make one, we have a great wedding article you can read.

Secret #2: Have a good listening ear with your vendors

Wedding professionals are just that, pros.

So, it’s helpful to listen to their advice and what they have to say, but not all couples good a good job at it.

For example, let’s say that you are deadset on having Lillies for your wedding day but your florist is trying to explain to you that Lillies are not in season and they cost 60% more during your wedding.

Instead of using 50% fewer Lillies to save you money, you wind up overpaying by having a few more.

My point is that with your wedding vendors, you should listen to their opinions and if possible, use their suggestions, it might just save you some money, heartache and the wedding will still come across great!

Secret #3: There is NO formal education

Believe it or not, nearly all people in the wedding industry didn’t have a formal education specifically for weddings. While there are classes people can take to become ‘certified’ in something like wedding planning, for example, no one gets a bachelor’s or masters in weddings.

Truth be told, most of us came from other industries as I did for example.

Back in the 1990s, I worked in broadcasting, TV, radio, and Hollywood and fell into weddings with the business I was working for back in the day.

Weddings have just stuck with me over the years and today I still have a major role in the industry.

Most vendors found their way into the industry one way or another, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, but we’ve all strived to get where we currently are.

Secret #4: Weddings DON’T have to cost a lot

Truthfully, some of the very best weddings I’ve covered in my career are some of the smaller, more intimate ones.

Think in between a micro-wedding and a full wedding.

Having 50-75 people, a private residence or venue, a photographer, DJ, and catering with finger foods seem to be a lot more fun than something with 300 guests and everything is over-the-top.

In fact, some of the larger weddings I’ve covered were more stressful because of all the detail and it made my job a lot harder.

And that brings me to my point about us vendors, truthfully, you don’t need any of them.

A trip to the local courthouse and civil service, generally less than $100 will cover your marriage.

So, why do we have weddings that tend to cost a lot?

In part it’s tradition and in part, you want to celebrate your marriage with loved ones.

What I will tell you is this, couples that spend in the range of $20,000-$25,000 tend to be a sweet spot within weddings.

While places like Wedding Wire and the Knot claim couples spend $34,000 give or take on a wedding, that’s mostly skewed for regions that have a higher cost of living, like New York City.

Truth be told, the average cost of most couples’ weddings is somewhere in the $25,000 give or take depending on your part of the United States.

You can certainly do a lot with $25,000 for the wedding day, it’s simply a matter of knowing the in’s and out’s of the massive wedding industry and having good people to guide you through those waters.