Received from anonymous bride, November 2006.
re: BUDGET ADVISORS

I spent the better part of 2 years planning my wedding. I discovered your website half way thru and diligently read about your new Budget Concept. I applied the concept to my wedding and want to share my experience with other brides. I knew going into it that it wouldn't be hard because I am so detail oriented. Boy, was I wrong. I think because a wedding is such a personal event, that my detail and planning skills (no I am not a profession in this field) often took a backseat to what I liked emotionally. Which brings me to my topic. In many of these bridal guides, they have budget advisors and/or budget planners with recommended percentages of what my overall budget for the wedding was. Well, as it turned out, the person who wrote that budget most likely never planned a wedding because if they did, they would find that the recommended percentages were far from reality. For instance, I was planning on spending $30k on my wedding, which would mean (as one planner put it) I would be spending 7% of that on my wedding Dress. Now, $2100 didn't seem too much for me but as I started shopping, I found great dresses for $1000. The same thing happened in every category and in most cases the recommended percentages were simply not enough to get a quality vendor. 4% of my budget for a DJ seemed like enough and that was actually close. But I ended up having to spend a little more than that. To make a long story short, I wound up just shopping around and seeing what things cost, without having any preconceived notions of what I might pay for it. Because if you think about it, how can someone other than yourself know what you are going to spend when each vendor in every category will have a different rate depending on the quality of services they offer? So my advice to all future brides is, shop! Look at 3 to 4 vendors in each category before you make a decision. When you call around, do not ask the price because, at least in my case, on a few instances, I had to spend way more than I was 'supposed' to have, according to the budget planner. But this is ok too. Because you can make up the difference someplace else in the budget with another service or vendor that you don't care as much about.