Wedding planning tips: ‘My wedding is in a week. I wish someone told me these five things when I started planning’

The matter over planning a wedding is that no one really teaches you how to do it, you’re just thrown in at the deep end and have to hope you can swim.

I’m now a week away from mine wedding and after about 18 months of planning, there is so much I wish I had known at the start – and I sometimes regret the planning.

There are the obvious things, like ‘everything costs more than you think’ and ‘pick a date in the colder months to save money‘, but a lot of the advice I would give myself if I could go back to the beginning of this whole crazy process goes beyond that.

So, as a 2026 bride getting ready to finally tie the knot, here’s what I wish I knew when I started wedding planning.

1. Book early, make decisions later

Good wedding vendors like photographers and makeup artists can book well over a year in advance, so I started looking for mine very early.

I got all my suppliers locked out within 12 months of my wedding date and wanted to start planning things like haircuts and floral arrangements right away… and that was a terrible idea.

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Your tastes can change a lot in a year, so settling on color palettes and major wedding decisions twelve months later is a recipe for chaos.

I changed my mind about which flowers I wanted three times in nine months, and I didn’t realize until weeks before the wedding that the furniture I rented wouldn’t fit in my venue.

My wonderful suppliers helped me deal with these issues, but in retrospect I should have booked suppliers earlier and then left the decision making until the wedding was closer.

2. Social media is driving you crazy – delete it if you can

As soon as I got engaged, my TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest feeds were taken over by wedding content.

It was exciting at first and a great way to get inspired.

Within three months I had gone crazy.

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I compared every wedding decision I made to what I had seen popular online and was convinced I had to pay for all these extra things I would never need, like Prada wedding shoes (I’m not in a Prada tax bracket).

We all know that social media can have negative mental health effects and that was certainly true for me while planning my wedding, especially as my algorithms fed me more and more.

If I could go back in time, I would use TikTok and Pinterest to collect a few weeks of wedding inspirations and then delete them from my phone for my sanity.

3. You can’t afford most of the weddings you see online

Another thing I learned too late about the weddings I saw all over social media is that many of them cost an absolute fortune.

I’m talking $20,000 spent on flowers, wedding dresses costing over $8,000, venues with a minimum spend of $60,000 – that’s pretty expensive.

The average Australian couple just can’t afford that, myself included, and that’s okay.

But looking at photos of weddings I could never afford made it difficult to plan within my own budget because I would set my heart on the way something looked before realizing it cost more than I make in three months.

I was also shocked to learn that many of the wedding photos circulating online are not from real weddings at all.

Many actually come from stylized wedding photo shoots with models, a custom-made dress and thousands of dollars worth of flowers spread across six-figure locations.

They look great, but aren’t exactly a realistic representation of the average wedding

4. Your wedding isn’t as important to your vendors as it is to you

This was a tough pill to swallow because my wedding, like most brides, felt like the most important thing in my life while I was planning it.

I’m an overthinker and when my suppliers (who were all great) didn’t respond within an hour of me sending an email, I often panicked and assumed something was wrong.

But the reality is that most vendors have multiple weddings every week, so yours is just one of many.

Your wedding is important to them and they care about making it special, but they also have plenty of other couples they work with who have their own lives to manage.

So if they’re slow to respond to a text or email, or don’t have time to answer your questions right away, don’t take it personally.

5. Don’t worry about things that aren’t important to you

Some of the things I worried about most while planning the wedding were the things I didn’t want to do but felt like couples needed to do, like long vows in front of all the guests, a flashy entrance at the reception, or a choreographed first dance.

I knew I had chosen the right person to marry when my husband-to-be turned to me and said, “Then we just don’t do those things.”

He didn’t want to do them either, so why force ourselves?

Some family members were disappointed when I said we would be skipping a few traditions, but ultimately your wedding is what you make of it.

So if you want to skip the bouquet toss, wear a black wedding dress, or choose your witnesses with a door lottery, just do it.

There really are no rules and I could have avoided a lot of stress if I had known that earlier.

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