There’s a line from one of my favorite songs that says, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger” (Ooh La La by Roonie Wood and Ronnie Lane).

So, dearest brides and grooms, here’s the advice I would give myself if I were planning another wedding:

(10) Start with the Big Picture, Not the Details

Sit down with your fiancé and figure out what kind of wedding you want. What do you want to be able to say about it when it’s over? What do you want your guests to say? How will you make your wedding memorable, relaxing, and fun? Develop a list of your goals and vision and then move on to the smaller details. Always ask yourself, “Does this small detail align with my broader goals?” Make decisions accordingly.

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Sometime in the middle of planning a $2,000 wedding, it occurred to me, “Why not think of it as a reunion instead of a wedding?” Weddings tend to focus on surface things like flowers, attire, and centerpieces. Reunions tend to be about fun.

When it was time to plan the reception, we focused on just that: Fun. We rented out an entire B&B in the mountains of Colorado. We set up tables in a grove of trees, and our guests feasted on homemade fajitas, tamales, guacamole, salsa, nachos, seven-layer dip, black bean and corn salad, frozen margaritas, and six different types of cakes.

After dinner, we gathered everyone on the flagstone patio for our first dance. Matt and I stood in the center of the dance floor, surrounded by a semi-circle of our wedding party. Our friend, Nick, announced that it was time for our first dance. Matt and I stared lovingly into each other’s eyes. The music started. It was “Kiss” by Prince. We immediately started scissoring our hands and gyrating our hips. The entire wedding party joined in and we performed a choreographed dance, complete with a semi-strip tease by Matt’s brother.

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At a lot of weddings I’ve been to, I’ve either felt like I was part of the “in crowd” or I was on the outside. If I’m in the wedding party? I’m part of the in crowd. If I’m not invited to the rehearsal dinner? I’m on the outside.

Even though Matt and I planned a $2,000 wedding, we didn’t want to have those kinds of divisions. We wanted to spend quality time with everyone. That’s why we opted for a Welcome Picnic instead of a traditional rehearsal dinner. In order for it to fit within our strict budget, we had to simplify: make-your-own sandwich bar (including organic meat from Whole Foods!), chips, watermelon, iced-tea, lemonade, and homemade chocolate cherry dessert with vanilla ice-cream.

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Last summer, I went to a very traditional wedding: stained-glassed windows coloring and diffusing the light, the priest commanding the audience with his noble presence, the flowers framing the scene, the bride and groom posing picturesquely.

And next to me in the pew was a fellow guest, bent over his cell phone, sending text messages to his friend.

Although texting is, by far, pretty high on the thermometer of wedding rudeness (up there with playing tic-tac-toe on the wedding program or having a thumb war with your date), his obvious disengagement left me wondering: How many people are equally bored with the ceremony but just too polite to do anything but look forward and smile blithely?

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Many of my friends got married the same summer I did. It was fun to compare notes during the wedding planning process. During one conversation, a dear friend said, “Yeah, our wedding isn’t too expensive either. Aside from the food at the reception, everything is pretty reasonable.”

I reminded her, “Aren’t you having your dress custom designed? How expensive is that?”

“Oh, that. I forgot. The dress costs about $2,000.”

That was our entire budget!

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When you undertake the seemingly crazy task of planning a wedding within a $2,000 budget, you have to think outside the box. When it came to the idea of traditional wedding vendors and wedding rings, we did exactly that.

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Honestly, one of the most difficult parts of the wedding planning process was trimming down the guest list (or should I say, “going at it with a machete”?). The list started out gigantic, even for our $2,000 wedding. We knew we had to cut it back because of Goal #5 for our ideal wedding: “We will have real time to spend with guests. We want to be able to spend quality time with our friends and family. We don’t want to follow the traditional pattern of a few wedding ‘events’ where the bride and groom only have time for a ‘meet and greet’: rehearsal dinner, reception, brunch the following morning. We want more of a family and friends reunion.” We knew that the bigger our wedding got, the less opportunity we would have to genuinely connect with our guests.

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My friend got engaged a few months before I did. By the time I baked a celebratory engagement cake and showed up on her doorstep, she had already purchased several bridal magazines and started a file folder to capture all her wedding ideas and inspiration.

Instead of starting with the details—dress, flowers, centerpieces, invitations—Matt and I took a different approach while planning our $2,000 wedding. We headed to a good Mexican restaurant to brainstorm our goals and vision for our wedding.

As a teacher, I learned to create lesson plans though a backwards-design approach. The idea is to start with the end vision first. You ask yourself, “What do I want students to know and be able to do by the end of this lesson?” Once you’ve answered that question, you can then plan the smaller activities that align with the end goal.

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People pretty much thought we were crazy. A wedding for under $2,000? On a Saturday evening? In July? With just seven months of planning?

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