5 Things To Do Immediately After Getting Engaged

Getting engaged is such an exciting step in your relationship! You’ve found the person you want to spend your life with, and they feel the same about you. And while “will you marry me?” was (hopefully) an easy question to answer, “how do I plan a wedding?” might not be quite so easy. So if the buzz of a proposal has started to settle down and your head is now swimming with what your next move is, don’t you fret…I’ve made it easy for you. Here are 5 things to do immediately after getting engaged.

1. SAVOR THE MOMENT

While it can certainly be tempting to jump right into the excitement of planning a wedding, don’t let this stage of life pass you by without savoring it. Take a week or two to simply exist with each other inside your cutesie lil love bubble. Talk about the future. Talk about your dreams together. Have a date night and sit on the same side of the booth and let everyone roll their eyes at how lovey-dovey you are. Post sappy announcements to social media and soak up all the love and excitement from your friends and family. I know you’re excited to make plans for the big day, but trust me on this. The time will pass by quickly enough without you rushing it along.

2. DETERMINE YOUR BUDGET

Once you’ve spent some time savoring the serotonin and are ready to begin talking about wedding plans, there are a few things you have to decide first before anything else can happen. And while it may not be a fun one, the very first step in the wedding planning process is to determine your budget and who all is contributing to it. In 2025, the average American wedding costs $36,000. The thing about averages, of course, is that it means there are weddings that happen for way less than that and weddings that happen for way more than that. It all comes down to what the two of you are comfortable with. Some budget-related questions you need to talk about together might include:

1. Will it just be the two of us paying for the wedding, or will our parents/a third party be contributing?
2. If someone else is contributing, how much are they offering? How will we navigate it if they feel their financial contribution entitles them to be part of the decision making?
3. Will we be using a credit card to pay for any of it? How much?
4. Will we be using savings to pay for any of it? How much?
5. Are we willing to go into debt? How much?
6. How much cushion will we set aside for unexpected expenses that we didn’t budget for at the beginning?

These questions can be hard and uncomfortable, but it’s necessary to talk about them from the get-go so you don’t run into even harder and more uncomfortable conversations later on.

3. CREATE YOUR GUEST LIST

Once you’ve determined your budget, the next thing you have to do is create your guest list. A $30,000 wedding with 250 guests will look completely different from a $30,000 wedding with 75 guests. On average, each guest you invite accounts for $200-$300 of your total budget. This means that you won’t be able to accurately determine how to allocate your funds between all the wedding vendors you need to hire until you know how many guests will attend.

“But Katie, how am I supposed to know how many guests will be there if we aren’t sending out invitations and asking for RSVPs until later??” Excellent question. The short answer? Give it your best guess. For local guests, rule of thumb is to expect 85% of those invited to attend. For out-of-town guests, this number goes down to about 55% (unless a large portion of out-of-towners are family, in which case that number can go up to 75-80%).

One final thought on your guest list: it can easily become a very stressful game of politics. “This person invited me to their wedding but that was years ago…do I have to invite her to mine?” “I’ve worked with this guy for 10 years, will he be offended if I don’t invite him?” “Will people think we’re rude if we don’t offer plus-ones?” At the end of the day, this is YOUR wedding. Make sure you do whatever you have to in order to ensure a beautiful, stress-free day for the two of you. If you need help thinking that through, check out this article on how to cut your wedding guest list.

4. CHOOSE YOUR DATE + LOCATION

Once you’ve accomplished the difficult-but-necessary tasks of determining your budget and guest list, the next step is to choose your wedding date and location. You don’t have to have your *venue* selected right away, you just need to decide which general area you’ll get married, and when you want to do it.

When thinking through your date, here are some questions to consider:

1. What kind of weather do you want? Spring blooms? Summer nights? Autumn colors? Cozy winter?
2. Are there any holidays you need to consider? Picking a date near a holiday like Labor Day or Memorial Day might offer you/your guests an extra travel day without having to take time off work.
3. Are there any sporting events you need to schedule around? (I hate that I even have to add that one, but especially here in the South, if you have your wedding on college football rivalry week you’re probably gonna lose a few guests.)

When thinking about the location, here are some questions to consider:

1. Do you want to stay local? Travel overseas? Go back to your hometown/state?
2. What area are most of your guests coming from, and how much will that affect your decision?
3. What kind of venue are you looking for? If you live in the South but hate barn weddings, your options might be more limited.

5. DISCUSS YOUR VENDOR PRIORITIES

With your budget, guest list, wedding date, and wedding location all squared away, you’re ready to start talking about hiring vendors. This might seem daunting, but the key is to take it one step at a time. Before you begin hiring wedding vendors, sit down and discuss which parts of the wedding day are most important to each of you. Maybe partner A cares a great deal about photography and flowers, but partner B cares more about food and music. Maybe the venue is super important to both of you, but neither of you cares that much about videography.

My suggestion? Make this a date night activity. Cook a yummy dinner together, pour some wine, light some candles, and discuss the top 5 most important parts for each of you. If it’s easier, you could also start by talking about which parts are LEAST important to you and that you’re okay with skimping on or nixing entirely.

Congrats cuties!! You’ve done a lot of work and you’ve gotten the hardest parts out of the way. Now that you’ve completed the 5 things to do immediately after getting engaged, if you need to, now’s a good time to take a breather and reconnect with your partner without talking about wedding plans. Have another date night, go on a mini getaway, plan a fun night in together…anything goes, but no wedding planning talk allowed!

On the other hand, if you’ve got some good steam going and don’t want to slow down, feel free to start diving into the next stages, like reaching out to vendors and creating mood boards. I HIGHLY recommend hiring a wedding planner for this part, but if that’s not an option for you, then take things one step at a time and always stay focused on the most important part: each other.