Right from the get-go there are obviously a ton of reasons why hiring a wedding planner is the right move. We want to take you through the pro's and (very few) cons of hiring a wedding planner so you know whether it's a smart move for you and your wedding celebration.
First off, let's address the 400 pound purple gorilla in the room: COST. According to an internal study by TheKnot.com the national average in 2020 for a wedding planner was $1,500. Now that price obviously can vary greatly depending on how in-depth your planner gets in the details of the event, as well as the scale of your wedding, and the location (big cities are going to cost more than rural small towns). Most people end up hiring a day-of coordinator which basically leaves you with the responsibility of finding, vetting, communicating with, and booking your vendors. Your day-of planner will help organize the timing of the day, and make sure everything is taken care of on your wedding day so that you don't have to be stressing and can just relax and enjoy. There are also month-of and full service wedding planners that will take on much more of these tasks like helping you pick out your wedding colors, design place settings and flowers, even help you pick vendors, attire, and pretty much every little detail. These full-service planners are obviously the most costly and are really a good choice if you are extremely short on time to plan the wedding yourself, and have a budget with enough room in it to justify the cost of a full service planner. If you think about all the things that can go wrong and how much of a headache that would cause you on your wedding day the prospect of spending $1,500 to eliminate that risk seems like a really good investment. In addition many planners will help you monitor your budget and make sure you're not spending way to much on unimportant things that should be saved for the really crucial stuff. In the end spending a few extra benjamins could end up saving you way more in the long run. Anyway what good is having the perfect day planned and spending all of this time and money on it if you aren't able to enjoy the day itself? Nobody wants to be arguing with the caterers or trying to adjust the table layout at the last minute to make up for the extra space your DJ is taking up when you should be drinking champagne and making the "love is eternal" face for your photographs. So let your planner take on that burden, it'll be worth the cost.
Second is the peace of mind you'll get from knowing that you're not forgetting or overlooking some major element. Most people planning a wedding have never done it before, and there are so many pieces to the puzzle that it can be very easy to forget say, getting a permit from the city to put your tent up or checking the local regulations regarding loud music late at night. You don't want the cops showing up while you're doing the snake and telling you to shut the party down because you didn't get the right permits or notify your neighbors. These are the little details that wedding planners literally live for, because NOBODY thinks about this stuff except for wedding planners. Did you think about where 150 people are going to go to the bathroom when you get married in that beautiful field behind your parents house? No? Well thankfully your planner calculated that you need three porta-potties trucked in that day. Otherwise grandpa is going to be taking a lot of trips into the woods while there is a 20 person long line inside your parents single bathroom house. Long story short there are just too many details that only professional wedding vendors think about for you to confidently plan an entire wedding by your lonesome. It's possible for sure, but the chances of forgetting something major that could ruin the entire day are just too high.
Lastly there are a bunch of things that we may think are really important when we're fantasizing about our perfect wedding celebration. Like the card stock of the invitations, the flavor of wedding cake, or the playlist the DJ will be bumpin'. These are all surely important details but it can be easy to get caught up in those things when there are still major chunks of planning that need to be done first. For example a planner may suggest for you to pick your wedding colors before choosing attire or flowers because once those dresses and orchids get ordered you are locked in. You may not know that wedding photographers are generally one of the first vendors to get booked and so they may be booked up a year or more out. So instead of getting all obsessed about what kind of food you'll be serving first you should be booking your venue and photographers, and you wouldn't have known it without consulting your planner (or I guess you could have just read this blog lol). Basically wedding planners are great at looking at the big picture and understanding what needs to happen when. We get so bogged down in the minutia that it's difficult to step back and realize you just spent three days making a spotify playlist for your DJ when you still don't have a venue, photographer or caterer booked. There is a best-practice for almost everything in this world and when it comes to weddings you'll never know all of them until you hire a planner. They are one of the most valuable investments you can make (that and photography of course!). You could be making a whole bunch of giant mistakes in your planning and not know about it until the s#$t hits the fan and by then it's too late. These kinds of mistakes can result in loss of time, money, or even damaged property and fines. So do yourself a favor and start looking up some wedding planners in your area today check out zola.com theknot.com or gigsalad.com.
We had an amazing planner for our wedding day and she helped us make sure that we took some time to ourselves after the ceremony. She made sure that we actually ate dinner instead of just going around saying hi to every single guest at the venue. She made sure that the caterers had adequate space to prepare the food and had a clear route to bring it out to the guests without getting knocked over by our ring-bearer and flower girls running amok. She has moved on and isn't in the industry anymore otherwise we'd recommend her here. We have recently worked with a planner that we thought was phenomenal and has become a good friend and she does amazing work. Her name is Laurie Mantegari and her company is Everyday Details. She literally went so above and beyond for this most recent wedding we worked with her that we think she deserves some kind of plack or something. She not only set up several zoom calls between us and the couple and made sure we were all on the same page, but she was the first one to the venue and the last one to leave. She contacted us several times beyond those group zoom calls to discuss details of planning the day. She was just the nicest and most put-together planner we'd ever encountered so we had to give her a shout out in this blog. She is truly a sight to behold, and we honestly can't imagine that someone could find a better planner than Laurie. That concludes our shameless plug of one of our favorite colleagues.
At the end of the day it's your decision whether or not you want to hire a wedding planner. I'm sure many people have gone without and nothing has caught fire. That being said I'm sure a bunch HAVE. One rule of weddings is that SOMETHING always goes wrong. Hopefully it's a tiny thing that really makes no difference, but just ask yourself if it's worth living, working and planning under that pressure knowing that your supposed-to-be-perfect day could become a real life nightmare, when you could just pony up a little extra cash and make the whole process about 1000% less painful. You do the math.
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