Tessa Broussard

I compare services for a living, and I have done it long enough to know that the hard part of a wedding is not taste.

I spent eight years editing consumer-service and personal-finance coverage, then three years running a regional publisher's wedding vertical, where my actual daily work was reading vendor contracts, reconciling quotes that did not match the proposals they came from, and calling companies to ask what a line item covered.

That is the work I do here, on a site organized around the order in which couples spend money rather than the order a magazine would run the photographs in.

You can trust this site for a specific and limited reason: I show my sources and I show where they fight.

The wedding category is unusually full of confident numbers with nothing underneath them, and the honest version of most cost questions is a range with a date attached and an explanation of why two reputable studies disagree by a wide margin.

When I cannot verify something, I write that I could not verify it. When a figure I published earlier stops being true, I change it and say what changed. Nothing on this site is tested in a lab, and I say that on the pages where a reader might otherwise assume it was.

What I specialize in is the money-and-timing layer: how a quote is built, what a deposit actually secures, which deadline is derived from which other deadline, and what a cancellation clause does and does not promise.

I am not a florist, a seamstress or a gemologist, and I do not pretend to be one. Everything on this site that touches a contract, a lead time or a dollar figure is reviewed by Renata Halloran, CWP, a working planner who has watched these failures happen to real couples.

I also write from my own mistakes, by name, because the two I made are the two most common versions of the same error. I counted the wrong unit and over-ordered invitations, and I budgeted money for my dress without budgeting weeks for the alterations. Both are avoidable with arithmetic that takes twenty minutes.

If you email me at [email protected] with a quote you cannot make sense of, that is the kind of message I answer.