There are lots of wedding budget articles out there on wedding websites and many have great information. However, one thing that I’ve seen is a trend that many of these articles tend to same similar things, but I also see a lot of wedding myths within them.

You Said Yes, Now What?

So, he finally popped the question and you said YES! You’ve told the family, you posted it online to share with all your friends and loved ones and now you get to start thinking about the wedding, ekkk!

So exciting!!!!

One of the most popular questions I see on Wedding Facebook groups all over the country is a simple one; “How much should we be spending on wedding photography?”

The answer to the question is really a multiple part one so today Carole and I are going to dive a little more into it to help provide you the best answer possible.

Hidden away near Roanoke, Virginia is perhaps the best wedding venue I’ve ever filmed at, Silver Hearth Lodge. The venue is actually a huge campus filled with many different places to get married on top of Bent Mountain. One of these mini venues is Scared Hearth Chapel, it’s the smallest church in Virginia and you can get married right inside of it.

Who doesn’t love great food, especially when its at an elevated level, right? Well, over the years, Carole and I have had the privileged of eating some of the regions very best delights and today we are going to give you our top 5 within the region that you should consider for your wedding day.

There was a time when weddings were not always cost the price of a new car or truck, in fact it’s only been in the last 20 some odd years that weddings have become so darn expensive.

The most often talked about answer is that putting a deposit down on a vendor locks you in with them and thats true. Putting down a hefty sum as a deposit takes the vendors date off the calendar and it secures it with you.

Let me give you a little knowledge to better help you understand.

Believe it or not, when you enter the world of wedding planning, you’re actually competing against other couples in the area. As I’ve stated before on the blog, approximately 2,200,000 couples get married each year in the United States and of that, about 55,000 are in Virginia. When we break things down even further, Southwestern Virginia has roughly 16,000 couples of the 55k that are getting married, about 29% of the state.

Today I’m about wedding crashers, we’ve just about all seen the movie, where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson go to wedding after wedding pretending to be a guest in order to drink, party and hook up with ladies. Well today, I’m going to talk about wedding crashers and let you know, yes they are real and I’m going to help you be ware of what to look for at your own wedding in spotting a “wedding crasher”.

Well, I’ve learned a few tips that I’d like to share with you that make a great speech even if you don’t have any mad speaking or writing skills. Let me share with you 4 of the best ones that I’ve come across in my career and hopefully you can use them to help you create your own speech for the new, happy couple!

It’s a great question that many couples just like yourself ask when planning a wedding. Let’s face it, planning a wedding is a bit like driving a car for the first time and you haven’t a clue what to do, let alone when or how.

Most wedding insurance is pretty much the same under the hood, it’s a liability policy that helps cover all sorts of things for your wedding day, mostly accidents from you, vendors and wedding guests too. Think medical costs and the like.

I was meeting with a bride/groom this week and they wanted to hire me for a 2021 wedding, which was awesome. We went over the contract, figured out all the details of what they wanted, got the price locked down and they wanted to pay me in full, right on the spot.

If you are a bride that getting married outside and you’ll be walking anywhere in or near grass, then you need to get this little-known secret. Sometimes called heel boots or heel protectors, they are little devices that go on the bottom of your heels that help prevent you from sinking into the ground and get stuck.

If you’re in the process of wedding planning and you’re looking to save the most amount of money for the wedding, Carole and I have some secrets that you should know about. They are often overlooked, misunderstood and can save you BIG if you are open minded.

Choosing the right wedding photographer is actually a pretty hard process when you see the mountain of wedding photographers out in the marketplace today. You have an entire range of prices, experience levels, quality, styles and personalities. You’ll find some wedding photographers are arrogant and self absorbed, you’ll find some pleasant to work with, some that are not worth the prices they charge and those that charge too little.

If you can, while planning a wedding, keep your emotion out of the process.

Trust me, it’s harder than it seems, I mean when you start looking at a vendor category, you’re going to be hit up with all sorts of marketing, media and sales, keeping emotion out of the decision making process will greatly help you book vendors that you want in your budget rather than overspending on one that evokes an emotion but really isn’t any better than their competition.

It could be a cheap vendor for $350 or it could be a cheap vendor for $1,250 or $3,000. It could also be for April, November or a date in 2023, no one knows and what will happen is that you’ll be bombarded with tons of leads and you don’t know if they can accommodate your wedding date, let alone if it’s within your budget.

If you’ve ever wondered how much alcohol to purchase for the wedding, it’s sort of vague when it comes to a Google search. In fact, the results can vary based on several factors like how many people are going to attend the wedding reception, how long the reception is going to be and your overall budget.

In a nutshell, a micro wedding is a wedding with 5 to 50 people or less for the wedding party, friends and family. Micro-weddings often have the same elements of a traditional wedding with far less cost and planning involved.

Millennial’s are starting to choose these smaller, more intimate wedding days because of the cost savings that they can have with their budget, yet many wedding vendors haven’t adjusted to this newest trend.

Today, I want to chat a little more about micro weddings, what they entail and give you some information to see if having one is right for you and your wedding day.