Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This planner is pretty much my Bible. Once we got engaged, I knew that we would be planning this wedding primarily on our own. We can't afford a planners services and I'm all about DIY - which is actually going really well for us with 8 months to go! This breaks everything down and gives insight into vendors and what you should be asking or looking for. While a good portion of sections don't apply to us, I still think this is a great thing to have if you're on a budget and not hiring a planner. I take it to work everyday and I love that it includes checklists and samples of budget breakdowns and all that fun stuff. I don't know about you, but I love making lists just so I can check things off but this makes me feel like I'm taking no prisoners! Anytime I come to a decision or hire a vendor or whatever, I open this up and check it off the timeline list. If I haven't made any progress in a couple weeks, I still look back at it to see where we are in terms of available time and final decisions. I ordered this like 2 weeks after we got engaged and when this showed up in the mail and I opened it; my fiancé literally shook his head and told me I was insane. Little does HE know that this thing has made planning a wedding (mostly on my own as he is extremely hands off and works swing shifts) as stress-free for me as it can get right now. I've added some sections and taken out sections that aren't applicable and I hole punch every vendor quote or email I get and place them in the correlating section. I've also made copies of the provided floor plans and made several layouts to determine which works best with our venue, and I've gleaned some pretty neat information from this. You can really use this binder to your advantage even if you aren't planning a big budget wedding, or you're having a more intimate wedding, or even if you're still using a wedding planner! You can tweak this to fit your needs and I honestly would not know what to do without this, this has helped keep me on track and even ahead of schedule. I will say this: planning a wedding can become all-consuming. For example, if you're like me and say : you and your honey decide to take a long weekend trip to the mountains in October and it's August, and then you obsess over planning EVERY.SINGLE.DETAIL until you actually leave - you're going to be exhausted. You're going to be so burnt out from planning what time you leave, what time you get back, triple checking your Airbnb reservations, making dinner plans for at least one night, what you're going to pack and "is the weather going to cold?" and all that crap, that you're not actually going to enjoy yourself. That's how I am; once a decision has been made to do something, I have to see the plans through to the very end to give myself peace of mind. I started off planning this wedding that way and realized that I wasn't doing myself any favors by constantly looking at this planner and following its timeline checklist. I eventually put the planner away for about a month and then went back to it with some clarity. Make sure you give yourself a break from planning every so often :)