Organizational Wedding Planning from a Type A Bride!

On any typical day, you would be hard-pressed to get me to acknowledge that I have a type A personality. I love organization, and in my world, everything has it's neat and orderly place. However, on some days I feel as if I teeter on the brink of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, while others I feel I could be on the TLC show "Hoarders."

You see, my problem isn't the desire or ability to live up to my anal retentive whims, no, it's that I am easily deterred from reaching my organization goals with even the slightest obstacle in my way. And I have a black-and-white mentality. I'm either being super organized or I'm a chaotic mess. No in-between. So, when it's come to wedding planning, I feel as if I cannot possibly continue until I have all of my info in its neat and tidy place, with convenient little boxes to check and to-do items to cross out.

My first stop on the organization train was re-configuring how much we could actually manage to save up for the wedding. Ideally, this would have been done before we booked a venue and committed to a price-point, but where's the fun in that without a little anxiety thrown into the mix? Also, our ability to save money was thrown off-kilter after I stopped working when I hurt my back. I'm happy to say that we have a very reasonable budget and, with all of the cuts made, will still be able to pay cash for our wedding and keep an open bar. I'm sure our guests are sayin' Hallelujah as we speak!

Personal Photo - Click for a larger image!

I made a basic excel spreadsheet (and apologize for my limited skill!) I have a column for our time-frame, how much money we currently have in savings (under "budgeted,") my monthly contribution, Mr. BB's monthly contribution, and the monthly total. From there I added another column, "Total Minus Budget," to account for the amount of money I remove from savings monthly to provide for my expenses for the following month. At the end of every month I plan to record what our actual amount of money saved was, and whether we have a surplus (yay!) or are in debt (boo!)

Next up was our overall budget. I found this link on Excel Blog from Office.com and downloaded the wedding budget template. From there, I watched the tutorial for super easy instructions on how to further modify the template to include cute little arrows to denote whether you are over/under budget. Sometimes, a little cuteness makes you feel a lot better about spending too much money, no? See for yourself:

Personal Photo - Click for a larger image!

 I highly suggest using this budget. It's easy to customize. I use the "estimated" budget column to put the actual amount we're spending (estimations be damned!) and use the second column to add what we've already paid for an item. The third column has the cute arrows to denote that, so far, we're under-budget on everything! There is also a nifty pie chart to help you visualize where your money is going.

I used a spreadsheet similar to our savings spreadsheet to formulate a master guest list. This sheet includes our guest name, relationship to bride/groom, number invited from each household, and address. From there we added a column to discern whether we have sent a save-the-date and invitation, and further columns to denote whether the guest is attending, meal chosen, table assignment, if they've given a gift and if we've sent a thank-you card. Phew!

Personal Photo - Click for larger image!

My plan today is to work on a "Master To-Do" list. I will be drawing off of lists on weddingwire.com, theknot.com, and a list that came with a wedding binder I received for Christmas. I plan to combine them all and then add some individualized tasks specific to my own wedding. I'm going to put it in Microsoft Word and add plenty of space for additions - I have a feeling my list will keep getting longer before it ever becomes shorter!

I now feel there is a bit more certainty in regard to wedding finances. Not that there wasn't before, but knowing that I have everything in a tidy "wedding" folder on my desktop, with easy access to it, makes my world spin a bit less out of control. The immense thrill of crossing off tasks and checking boxes is enough to motivate me to continue planning with fervor, and if that's not an indication of my Type-A-ness than I don't know what is!

Do you have formal budgets or to-do lists? Did the organization make you feel more in control of your wedding planning?