wedding requirements!! get married in us or mexico?

this may be a really silly question, but if my fiancé and i did the legal ceremony here, then we won't have to arrive 4 days prior to the wedding in mexico to have it count, right? i just want to make sure i am reading this correctly--this will help us out huge!!

thanks

There has been quite a few posts on this subject so I don't want to go into too much detail as there is a lot of info on BDW about this already.

Jay and I were legally married in Mexico. Since we eloped to Mexico, it didn't make too much sense to get married here in the states too. It really wasn't too much of a hassle and cost us about $250. I was divorced too so I had to get extra paperwork that most of you won't need. Getting my name changed on everything wasn't too bad. All in all it was worth it to us because of our marriage certificate (en Espanol) is the ultimate keepsake of our beautiful Mexican Wedding.

BE ASSURED THAT IF YOU ARE LEGALLY MARRIED IN MEXICO YOU ARE LEGALLY MARRIED IN THE US. City hall gave us mixed messages too regarding the legality issue. I believe I found clarification on the US Dept. of State website.

Yea, we're also getting legally married at home first, and then doing the ceremony in Mexico. The main reason for this is that we don't want to get there so many days in advance since we're only going for a week. So we are getting married the second day we're there, and then have the rest of the week to just chill and enjoy the vacation.

We were thinkin go of having the ceremony first in Mexico then coming back to get married legally in US.

We were told that if you marry towards the end of the year (like we are) you will be taxed as a couple as if you were married since the beginning of the year. So we're holding off to legally marry until Jan 09.

FI and are will be legally married here in the US first. It's absolutely a formality, but it just made sense - he was married previously and we just don't want to go thru the hassle of getting things translated, etc.

We'll celebrate our anniversary on the date that we have our symbolic marriage in Mexico.

We will marry civilly in the US. And then have the wedding ceremony there.

The reason for this is we do not have to worry about translating our marriage certificate & paying additional fees. Also, the wedding package costs less when you just do a 'symbolic/religious ceremony" at our resort (and most others). All we have to do is tak eour marriage certificate down there and voila. We are saving about $700 doing this.