Short vs Long Engagement with Kimberly Rhodes

I have Kimberly Rhodes with me. She is a wedding and event planner and designer. And she's going to chat with me about short versus long engagements. With more than 20 years of event planning experience ranging from corporate conferences to nonprofit galas, Kimberly Rhodes found her love for weddings while planning her own. Now in its 10th year her award-winning event planning company, Hitched Events focuses on beautifully detailed weddings and other celebrated jewelry events in the Dallas area. Kimberly is passionate about creating events that are just as stunning as they are seamlessly executed. And she's fueled both by complicated event logistics and gorgeous design aesthetics. In 2016. Kimberly launched This Week in Weddings, one of the very first wedding industry podcasts for entrepreneurs, now enjoyed by event professionals all over the world. She also serves as the immediate past president of the Dallas Fort Worth chapter of the National Association of Catering and Events. When she's not planning and designing fabulous weddings or co-hosting and podcasts, you can find her watching every reality show on Bravo, cuddled up with their husband, dog in a glass of wine are digging into chips and queso on a study patio.

Let's face it, everyone needs this episode before settling on the decision, because there are major factors to consider, perhaps that you wouldn't even think to consider unless we had brought them up to you. In this episode, we'll talk through how the length of your engagement can affect the cost of your wedding and the stress involved in planning it. We'll also talk about how the decision can affect your guests and who may or may not attend. Let's get right into this interview with Kimberly.

This decision is one of the first decisions that you will have to make and when people go into choosing a wedding date most think that they need a year to plan a wedding. So for us for my husband, and I was like the longer engagement helped us save money every month for the wedding that we really wanted. Whereas if you had a short engagement, that money has to be available right now. So it allowed you to have more things because you had that time to save and truly plan for it. So that's a huge benefit.

Honestly, I could argue it both ways because I think there are pros and cons for both. For long engagements, those are probably two of the biggest reasons for financial reasons to be able to save. And the other reason, I think, is just to be able to enjoy just that time being engaged. It's such a special time in your life when you just like all love and the excitement of it. And it allows for you to have more of these special moments from start to finish, like the showers.

Some of the most popular venues are booked out a year in advance. A longer engagement period gives you more options. So for someone who has very specific things that they definitely want to make sure they get, the longer engagement will help them do that.

How defeating is it when you get all the things you want, but the band that you want so much doesn't work out for that date. But if you had done it just even a couple of months in advance, you could have had them.

I think for some people a long engagement is ideal. But I also think on the other side there are types of people that I have had where a long engagement is not ideal and I would say for someone who is indecisive, a long engagement just makes the whole process more complicated. It's a stressful thing for them. Those are the people that need to check things off and be pushed into that direction maybe. In fact, I would say that's probably the most important reason to go with a short engagement. If you think that planning a wedding is going to be anxiety-ridden for you and if you already know from the get-go, that you will flip back and forth with decisions that will cost you money doing that, a short engagement might be right for you.

Another thing to think about is your family dynamic and how that’s how it is going to be when you're planning a wedding. If you've always had issues with money, that's not going to change when you're planning a wedding. If you've always disagreed with your mom, that's not going to change. It's just turned up a level and so if you're the kind of person who has analysis paralysis and just making a decision is very difficult or stressful, a shorter engagement kind of forces you to make decisions more quickly. It's less overwhelming for that reason because you have fewer choices. When you have your planner helping you out, they are able to say that we have six weeks to get this done, or three months or six months.

I will say as we're just like kind of tossing around both sides. I also just thought about your guests and their availability. So a longer engagement, you have the opportunity to do a save the date and put it on people's calendars early and people have time to make travel arrangements, etc. Where is if you're doing something shorter like that, under three months, timeframe, I think it's just being mentally prepared that sometimes people schedules are going to fill up. 

Here's the thing, when you're in that frame of mind, there's too much time to go back and forth with things. And there's always gonna be that long pause in the middle, where really nothing can get done because you set all your foundations. And then there's this wall where it can be done because you don't know who's coming. You haven't sent out invitations yet. It's a lot.

Kelly, since you brought up pricing, can we talk a little bit about some price advantages of shorter versus longer engagements. Not that this is true for every single vendor category by any means. However, there are some categories, if you're looking at a hotel, for example, if there have that space open, and you have a short turnaround, you are very likely to have more negotiation room chances and exactly the chances of them booking another event in a short period of time are slimmer than if you're planning two years ahead of time.

There are a lot of venues as well that will not open it up to social clients until they've had plenty of time to try to sell to a corporate client and so they will not release dates to weddings until they know for sure that that date is not going to be taken by a potential corporate client who would be spending more money there. If you're wanting to have your wedding at one of these locations, you may be sitting there waiting and just hoping that they released the date that you want. And it may or may not happen.

Another good thing that you brought up that I am very friendly with is that if you do short-term, you don't have to do save the dates. Just send out the invitation when it's time to send out the invitation and that can be helpful if you're trying to limit your guest list a little bit. It also helps with the budget and it's just an added cost back.

There are the benefits, some of the better benefits to do short term that you really can't you have the upper hand on negotiating a lot of times. And sometimes people are just making last-minute deals and they're just coming right at you.

The cons are when you're doing short term, but you really do want a lot of people there, especially with destination, if they just can't make it in that short timeframe, especially destination in particular, it's an expense for your guests. So if it's somewhere where it's going to be an expensive thing that they really don't have, they would need to save up to be able to come as well.

That's something to consider when you're trying to decide first that you want to have a destination wedding, and that it's going to be something that might be of an expense to your guests, then giving them that lengthy amount of time to plan for one, but also, just for the calendar wise, but also financially, is something to consider.

I think Kelly made a good point earlier is that people assume for whatever reason, from whatever magazine they read forever ago that they have to do a year or more like that's just kind of an assumption that is not necessarily true. Especially if you have somebody who is helping you like if you have a planner like honestly, we could plan your wedding beginning to end in a week if we had to. We have the connections, we know what to do. We could do it in a week, truly. So feeling like you need a year is not necessarily factual.

One of the cons of a short engagement is fashion because a lot of these dresses from a dress shop, where it's not off the rack, they are made to order so they're not making your dress until it is actually ordered and sometimes those can take six months or more to come in.

Dress shops will be able to tell you when the ship dates are for different designers. You want to go into a dress shop with your event date so you can make sure that your dress is going to ship in time because some are longer than others. And they can often steer you into the direction of something that is going to come in in plenty of time. But the other option is to go to a department store or order something online. It doesn't have to be from a bridal shop.

Depending on how short of an engagement you may not be able to do all those pre-wedding things that are fun and the excitement of it. I do feel strongly about this idea, the engagement period is so important, not just because you're like we're so in love but you are planning your marriage, like the planning of your life together, like this is the time you're talking about finances and making decisions and how you plan for big things. The planning of the wedding really translates so well to the planning of your life. For example, how you're dealing with each other's parents and all of that stuff that comes up as you're planning the wedding.

We just want everyone to enjoy their engagement no matter how long it is, and to be able to make all their decisions with education. I'm so glad that you could join me and then you'll have to come back in season two on we'll talk about something else.