Sarah-Louise Anderson reveals how her $60,000 micro-wedding sparked family feuds, severed friendships, and taught her which relationships were worth keeping—all over ginger beer and missing guests.

Film photography is overrated, organic carrots don't make a good wedding, and Kiera Ryan from Creative Weddings Byron Bay chooses the three wedding photographers she would get if she was getting married this afternoon as she joins the first episode of my new podcast, For those of you who don't know me…

Links from the episode:
Bayleigh Vedelago wedding photographer
Cassandra Ladru wedding photographer
Megan Kelly Studio
Creative Weddings Byron Bay
Dear Future Bride Podcast
Josh Withers Celebrant

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Its Purpose
02:05 The Essence of Meaningful Weddings
04:52 The Role of Wedding Planners
08:15 The Impact of Wedding Planning on Couples
10:25 Film Photography in Weddings
13:25 Choosing the Right Wedding Photographer
17:41 Candid Photography vs. Posed Shots
19:45 The Importance of Communication with Photographers
27:23 Navigating Wedding Planning Expectations
33:38 Underrated Aspects of Wedding Staffing

In this pre-inaugural episode I want to set up the RSS, Spotify and Apple Music feeds

The biggest stress I encounter with writing a book, and especially with sharing it with you here is that I have these great ideas all bouncing around my head and they all feel like such great ideas, but as those philosophies and thoughts reach my finger tips they turn to mud.

So thank you for trasping through the mud with me as we write this book together. My gut tells me I'm just throwing your globs of mud every day, so if there's some value here, let me know in the comments or in email to let me know my gut is wrong.

Having explored the economics of the wedding industry, and before you start contacting vendors, let’s build on your mental model - your wedding planning philosophy - on how to budget for a wedding.

Normally when people start talking about wedding budgets they’ll talk about how much you should expect to pay for a photographer and how much to pay for catering. We’re not taking that route, we’ll make choices on vendors soon, as we survey the marketplace and decide who can provide services so that we can have the best wedding that expresses who we are and what our values are, a wedding with intent. Today though we’re going to provide a framework on how to approach budgeting and paying for a wedding, and instead of starting with a date and working backwards, we’ll start with cash and work towards a date.

My personal disposition is to not enter into debt for things that aren’t property, but I’m also a champion of adults making their own damn adult decisions, so if you want to enter married with a wedding-sized debt that’s your cross to bear, but I’m going to assume we’re not going into debt on this one.

Another assumption I’m going to make is that the two of you want to have a lifelong and joyful marriage, which means you either have done or are about to, combine finances and have joint accounts etc. Research shows that people who don’t combine finances don’t combine their lives and might as well save money on a wedding and just not get married. But hey, that’s just my opinion.

So as we would do with any purchase, we start with what we have:

And then we figure out how much per month we can save:

Then we need to figure out how much we’d like to spend, and if you’re following this book chapter by chapter, you won’t know that yet, but we’ll create a variable for it:

And when we put it all together in an equation with m being how many months away this wedding can be it looks like:

So once you know how much you want to spend, pull out your calculator and go

So maybe you’ve decided that the wedding will cost $30,000. You’ve saved $20,000 already, and you can easily save $1000 a month.

So if you’re reading this in January, you could be hosting your wedding in November!

Working out your total expenses will be an activity split between scalable and static expenses. For example, my job as a celebrant is static. Generally speaking, my fee doesn’t change if there are 20 guests or 2000 guests, but then if there were 200

We’ve got one final stop on this road trip to Weddingvendorville before we start booking wedding creators and that’s to talk about how the wedding industry isn’t like every other industry.

I believe that one of the leading causes of stress and anxiousness in wedding planning is the beautiful coming together of two people who are, for most likely the first time, planning the biggest event they’ve ever planned, gathering the most people, from the extremities of their family and friendship trees, spending the most amount of money they’ve spent yet, and they’re doing it in an industry unlike any other.

And instead of understanding how the wedding industry is different, people bang on about the "wedding tax" without understanding the complexities of creating weddings and running businesses around that skill.

There’s no industry that can directly be compared with the wedding industry. Just ask all of us who went through the pandemic and tried to get other work. Creating weddings really well is a very specific and valuable skill that doesn’t exactly translate to working 9 to 5 for a global corporation.

You might think that the corporate events industry would be an easy translation, but even the corporate and business events industry is different. If you attend one of those big name conferences or events, the budgets are so much larger, and the events are so much larger. The providers of services have to operate in ways that governments and corporations like, we’re talking tender processes, massive quotes, big numbers, purchase orders, catering for thousands of people, parking and amenities for the same numbers. If you’ve worked in weddings you’ll walk into those government and corporate events and have a real appreciation for doing things on that scale.

But if you’re planning a wedding for 50 to 150 of your closest you’re not calling those people, if only because you don’t want boxed lunches to be handed out, and you don’t want a cookie-cutter corporate event. You’re creating an intimate and personal affair.

The wedding industry is almost exclusively home to micro to small businesses. In my 15 years of meeting and working with wedding vendors I’ve met maybe 10 businesses with staff numbers larger than five people, and revenues of more than $500k. When you contact a wedding vendor it’s more than likely that it’s a solo operator or a duo/couple.

Controversially I’ll say that you don’t want to hire a wedding vendor who does weddings as a side-hustle or a hobby, I simply think your wedding deserves a dedicated artist whose time is devoted to creating the kind of creations you want at your wedding.

Full time wedding  creators are limited in the amount of output they can bring to market each year. They’ve done their own maths and come to an understanding that with all of the associated work they might be able to create 15, or 30, or 80 weddings a year. They know their expenses and they have an income goal for their household, so it’s a simple calculation of:

Then:

I’ve very much over-simplified the process, and each business and each category of wedding creator will have their own specific way of pricing themselves, but that math is a good start.

There are just so many costs of business that are not immediately known by the general public. You can start by talking about insurance, registration and government fees, income taxes, state taxes, goods and services taxes, vehicles, maintenance, fuel, etc. Then start talking about the cost of equipment to make the art, whether it’s the $30,000 of camera gear, or the $5,000 PA speaker system. Travel, rental car, flights, accommodation and travel time expenses.

And we’re not even at the

I'm not going to lie, writing a book is hard. You get all excited and start writing and eventually you get all those initial words out, and then - in my experience at least - your brain and your fingers disconnect for a moment and you lose the ability to make words out of the thoughts in your head.

Do not fear though, your intrepid writer spent a few days trying to burst through that dam wall between "figuring out why you're having a wedding" and "here's how to get some epic wedding vendors" and I'm hoping this chapter is it.

From here we're going to start down the list of the different categories of wedding vendors, so I'm really looking forward to the hate mail I'm going to get as we open each of those cans of worms.

The next logical extension of figuring out how people like you get married is shaping that vibe and intention into something that resembles the skeleton of a wedding.

Your wedding-creating team, your wedding vendors, will flesh out your intentions and dreams on that skeleton, but we need a starting point.

The head of your wedding is the list of answers we went through before. Your core values, worldviews, and beliefs as a couple. Where are you going as a couple, what are your intentions for your wedding and how would you like it to feel?

The heart of this whole thing is so much more important than anything else, and it's not even about 'the day'. The heart of your wedding is your marriage and I hope that your marriage is bigger and better than your wedding, that as good as your wedding could be, it's only your best day so far and that your best as a couple is yet to come! In-fact, if it isn't, let's stop and regroup once we realise that it's super weird if your wedding is the best day of your life.

Much like a human body, the spine is the bit that holds everything else together and basically changes a blob of jelly into a body.

In wedding planning lingo we're talking about the general timeline of your wedding. We're not talking exact times yet, but what part of the day, then how will things look in that day-part?

This is not the complete list, but it's a good starting point of day-parts to choose from.

• Sunrise into breakfast
• Breakfast or brunch through to noon
• Lunch into the early afternoon
• Afternoon into the sunset
• Sunset into the evening
• Night (after sunset)

You'll note I don't mention times off the clock, because time doesn't matter as much as "relative to sunset" for the kind of event you're having.

Think about the difference between meeting a friend over lunch and going camping with a friend and talking around a campfire. Same friendship, two different day-parts, and I bet the campfire goes much deeper and is more intimate.

The most common day-part for a wedding would be sunset into the evening and it's no secret that it doesn't matter where in the world you are, or what time of year it is, it's almost certain that a late afternoon into the evening event is just nice. The temperature is best, the light is beautiful, the sunset colours are beautiful, and then the celebration continues into the night.

But that doesn't exclude the other day-parts from being fun and valid.

I've created sunrise elopements in that amazing just-before-sunset light and the couple of went off for an Eggs Benedict intimate breakfast

Writing this chapter prompted me on a future book, The Rebel's Guide to Eloping. There's so much confusion around weddings and elopements I've now committed myself to writing two books. Lord knows how many will come after that.

As always, your comments and reviews are welcome as I write this book in public, it's how a rebel does things, out from under the shadows, in the full light of day.

Join me on email to get the full light of day right next to an email from your boss.

This is a short note on elopements because I have a whole other book I’m writing on the whole deal, but in planning a wedding I wanted to be sure about how a wedding is different to an elopement.

An elopement is not a wedding. An elopement is not a small wedding, an intimate wedding, a micro wedding, or an elopement wedding.

A wedding is a wedding, and you’re not going to believe this, an elopement is an elopement.

Here is how they differ:

Both are great options, but you can’t fit a wedding into an elopement and you can’t stretch an elopement into a wedding. They are different events with different purposes and different intentions.

You probably already know if one or the other is for you, it’s not for me to move you either way. That’s our commitment at The Elopement Collective, my wife’s elopement company. We actively turn people away because they don’t want to elope, they maybe want to spend less on a wedding, or they might want to buy a packaged wedding. Those people are who I’m writing this book for, if you’re going to have a wedding, have an intentional wedding.

An elopement would be one of the most intentional getting-married decisions you can make, but it’s not a wedding.

Today's chapter is a favourite conversation of mine. Something I love about being in the wedding business is that planning a wedding is one of the first big things a couple does together. For many couples, it’s the most people they’ve gathered together, and the most money they’ve spent, and it’s a fantastic exercise in working on your relationship as you make such a large undertaking.

So as you undertake it with your significant other, I hope you get to a place of peace and joy.

Also, if you fnid a typo or if words I use mistakingly in a sentence, then B shure yo comment so I dont miss nething wen dis goes to my editr.

You’ve probably walked past, in a public park, or a shopping mall, a big brand doing some sort of promotion. It might be the Red Bull car, with really good-looking people in Red Bull uniforms, handing out free Red Bull; a free sausage sizzle in front of a hardware store; or Veuve Cliquot opening pop-up champagne bars in fancy locations. Inside the marketing industry, these are called brand activations. A good brand activation leaves everyone who interacted with it, aware of the brand’s qualities and products.

It’s fairly hard to leave a Red Bull brand activation without knowing that Red Bull sells Red Bull drinks in a can, and you’ll know what they taste like, how they make you feel, and you’ll probably have “Red Bull gives you wings” stuck in your head.

Think of your wedding as a brand activation.

You’re telling a bunch of people who you are. What do you taste like? What are your values? Your worldviews? What do you not value? You’re saying as much in what you don’t do as in what you actually do, do. If everyone from work is invited, that’s possibly less special than if a guest is the only person from work invited. That means you singled them out as someone who had to be there.

Truth be told you could have anything and everything at your wedding. It could be a music festival with thirty bands and twenty food trucks. Or it could be a small event in a wine bar that fits fifteen people.

When Justin and Hayley Bieber got married they had at least three photographers, from completely different studios, photographing different things because that’s what they valued, but I’ve been to a wedding where there wasn’t a photographer.

The key here is to figure out, how do people like you marry. I’d sit down with your partner and talk through these questions and write down the answers.

• What is important to you both? Why?
• What is important to only one of you? Why?
• What must happen at your wedding for it to even be called a wedding?
• What could force you to reschedule or change your wedding?
• What have you loved at other weddings? Why?
• What have you hated at other weddings? Why?
• What vibe or thought do you want everyone to leave your wedding with? Why?
• What elements make a good event?
• What music have you liked at other events? Live music? Or a DJ playing music? Or a non-professional layout of music, a.k.a “off an iPod” despite no one really having iPods anymore.
• What kind of food service have you enjoyed at events before? Sit-down dinners? Finger food? Buffet? Food truck?
• What kind of vibe do you think you have as a couple? Look around your house, what kind of vibe are you projecting to guests to your house? Look across your social media and think about what kind of vibe you’re projecting to people online. (This is the style and the vibe you should take to your wedding - be authentically you.)
• Do you like photography? What kind of photography do you like?
  Do you want photos like that of your wedding day?
• Do you enjoy short videos? What kind of video do you like? Do you want a video like that documenting your wedding?
• What do you think the most important part of a wedding should be? Why

In my years as a marriage celebrant a common statement couples make as we’re planning their ceremony is that they want a ‘chill wedding’.

When you host a wedding you’re doing just that, hosting. The whole vibe of this book is to establish and develop purpose and intent around what you’re hosting, and when we say we want to make it chill we’re negating our role as host.

Things that are chill, are relaxed, they’re a lazy weekend, by the poolside in a resort, but events with intent have leadership.

As you arrive at a purpose-driven event planned with intention we know why we’re there and what’s happening. Not because there are signs pointing the way, but because our decisions have been made with clarity and intention.

When you abdicate leadership you create a vacuum that can and will be filled with useless traditions and other people’s opinions.

This isn’t to say that an intentional wedding is intense and stressful. It’s just not chill. Everyone at an intentional wedding can tune in to the vibe you’re laying down. There’s no guesswork involved. There’s a plan being executed by your wedding-creating experts, and there is a place for everything and everything is in its place.

When most people say they want a chill wedding, they’re not talking about some kind of loose shin-dig, but they don’t want there to be stress on the day. I hear that and please, do not worry at all, but stress at a wedding originates from one or more of three places:

1. Un-communicated expectations

This might sound crazy, but we don’t know what we don’t know. If you have an expectation of someone, it’s your sin if you don’t communicate it. And you might think it’s something they should know, but at the very heart of what we’re doing here is changing expectations and dropping the status quo, so expectations can be expected to be different. Communicate your expectations.

This is actually great life advice.

A solid source of stress at a wedding is when “this is supposed to be happening now” and it’s not happening, and it’s either because the people making it happen are incompetent, or the timing for the wedding wasn’t well planned. Two signs of an amateur team. By amateur team, I’m taking a clear swipe at your friend who just bought a camera and is ‘really into photography’ whilst also taking a shot at the alleged wedding professionals who don’t know how to create a good wedding.

A professional says that something will take 30 minutes and it just does. A professional says that something will happen, and it does. Amateurs do neither.

Finally, this is the hardest nut to crack, and it reminds me of our two pregnancies. For most of my life, I’d successfully avoided ever talking about a vernix or colostrum, but the second you announce you’re pregnant every conversation with anyone, even strangers, is about this how this impending joy is about to spring forth into your life - and most of it is bad advice. Not bad in the medically-bad advice, but bad as in it’s not contextually personal for us. It’s other people’s experiences with birth or parenting and their experiences aren’t necessarily ours.

These people, as lovely as they are, don’t know that you’re having a wedding with intention, so don’t expect them to be

The path to an intentional wedding is light and airy, it’s not supposed to be hard. That’s my biggest gripe with the world today, that when you do the hard work of finding someone you really like, and then you fall into love, so much so that you would want to marry, the entire narrative is that it’s hard, it’s stressful, it’s expensive and basically terrible.

It’s the narrative you read about, you hear about, and everyone parrots, that as you proceed through the steps of life things get harder. Getting married? Hard. Having kids? Hard. Buying a home? Hard. Starting a business? Hard.

The truth is that all these things are hard if you’re not walking your own path, living an authentic and vulnerable life in a community with people that you love, and love you. When you’re freed of the burdens of keeping up with the Joneses and the Kardashians, and you make decisions as a couple things aren’t hard, they just are what they are because you decided so.

Take the example of hiking a mountain. If you never climbed the mountain the mountain would be fine without you, but there are personal fitness gains to be had from the hike, it can be enjoyable, the view from the top will be unforgettable, and if you’re doing it with friends it will be enjoyable. The unavoidable fact is that walking up a mountain can be tough on your body, but you’ve made the personal choice to embark on the adventure. It’s not hard, it’s just exactly what it is. A large amount of energy is required of you.

I’ve got two daughters and raising them is much like climbing a mountain, they require a lot of me, but they bring me so much joy and fulfilment, and they have certain requirements of Britt and I, but it’s not hard being their dad. It is what it is because we decided to become parents. We were so very intentional with this decision.

As you embark on marriage, it’s impossible to be married without getting married, so as you get married, make those decisions with intent. Knowing they may require finance, energy, and talking through decisions with your partner, but it’s not hard. It’s not stressful, it is what is, the beautiful process of getting married.

To have an intentional wedding the steps ahead of you include:

In the coming chapters, we’ll explore these steps and the actual wedding planning in more detail. But the important takeaway today is that your expectations are in line with your realities, and you chose a