NJBride2014

Church Ceremony Rosary/Lasso Since we are getting married at our church before cancun we wanted to incorporate the lasso/rosary ceremony and this is the rosary we bought. Its beautiful and is something nice we can pass down to our future kids and will always be blessed and stay in our family. Shoes for Both Wedding Dresses Shoes to go with the at home church wedding dress. Found them at Lord and Taylor and with a coupon they came out to $40.00. Shoes for Cancun Wedding dress. Found these on Ruelala.com on sale for $89.99 and I loved the beading it goes great with my belt's beading. Wedding Accessories Wedding dress belt Earrings My fiance actually bought these earring for me as my "wedding gift" he designed them with the jeweler who also made my engagement ring and wedding band. I love it and can't wait to wear them. Bracelet Wedding Band I went with an eternity wedding band it fit just right with my engagement ring and can be worn alone if i choose not to wear my engagement ring. I don't have a picture of my fiance's ring but its very similiar to this ring the middle part is more of hammered look he didn't want anything too shiny since he works at a Jail as a probation officer and that would probably scratch a lot. The brushed/hammered look is less fancy and more practical for him. We bought our rings last year when the price was low and we we got great deals on both rings. The jeweler also gave us a little discount since my fiance bought my engagement ring through them.

My groom is wearing a full suit with tie and the groomsmen are wearing the same colored pants with white button down shirts no tie. This is the look we are going for not super fancy and formal but also not beachy and casual. We are also not getting married on the beach/sand we are getting married on a gazebo facing the ocean so I thought we could dress up a little.

I invited 100 people and I will have 40 coming to the wedding almost half. I'm happy with the amount of people.

I love dafont used it to make a lot of my signs for the wedding.

I'm actually having a church/legal ceremony a week before we go to Cancun. I wanted to just go to city hall and have something simple but my fiance really wanted the whole church ceremony. I gave in and now its like planning another mini wedding. We've met with our priest like 5 times lol and had to take pre cana classes. At first I wasn't really into the idea but now that its a month away and a lot family and some friends who are not joining us in Mexico are coming to the church i'm actually glad he talked me into it. Its also nice to do it at our local church so we can always share that with our future kids. Definately is stressful though planning two ceremonies.

@@nicofio22 I love Tradesy.com and recommend it to anyone trying to sell some stuff that is still in good shape but you no longer use. It's very simple to set up and I get the money right away in my paypal account. For surveys I've been doing them on off for years on line to make some extra cash on the side, I save my gift cards to buy things off of Amazon. Here is a website that has all the survey site that are available and what they are about. http://www.surveypolice.com/ I'm a member of harrispoll, myview, mysurvey and I thnk one other one. I get surveys emailed to me everyday and if I have time I'll sit down and answer some questions and get points then when you reach a certain number of points you can trade them in for gift cards etc.

Engagement Photos When we went to on our site visit back in Oct. 2013 we decided we would also have an engagement session with the photographers we hired for our wedding. Del Sol Photography was one of the vendors we fell in love with from the beginning and we knew we had to book them for our wedding. It was great to do the engagement pictures and get comfortable together in front of the camera. I'm super happy with how the photos came out and can't wait for them to do my wedding. Wedding Dress and Accessories I have 3 dresses, yes 3 dresses but let me first say that I'm have two ceremonies. I'm getting married at home first in the church my fiance and I both grew up in. I didn't want to use the same dress that I'm using in Cancun so I bought a dress for the church ceremony. I also have a 2nd dress for my Cancun wedding for the after party which is more of a fun short dress. The dress for the church ceremony was a good deal and perfect for what I wanted. A nice simple dress that was still bridal. It's an Adriana Papell dress that I found at Macy's randomly and it just happened to be my size. With a coupon it came out to $140.00. My Wedding Dress I bought at my local bridal shop and fell in love with it when I tried it on. I just knew it was the one. I got lucky I only went to one store and only tried on 4 dresses. It was meant to be. I bought the dress at a trunk show so I did get a little bit of a discount. My dress is a Pronovias 2014 Land and was about $1,500.00, my budget was under $2,000.00 so I was glad I stayed under. I also bought a belt that reminded me of seashells and the beach. My veil and headpiece also came from the same bridal shop. The party dress I bought at a grab the gown event at Loheman's and it was actually the first dress I bought. It was on sale for $200.00 and I'll probably sell it afterwards. It was fun and flirty and cute and just reminded me of Mexico. My fiance has no idea I bought it.

My Engagement Celebration These are pics after we got engaged and went home. My grandpa serenaded my fiance and I with a nice spanish song. He will also be playing us a song in Mexico. I can't wait for him to perform and have it all on film. Booking My Resort and Group Rates/Block Picking the resort was easy since we always had LeBlanc in mind for our wedding but trying to get infomriton about how to go about booking and getting prices did take some work. I first contacted the resort in May of 2013 and inquired about their prices and wedding packages and that's when we decided we would like to visit the resort to meet with our planner and see things in person again. We booked our site visit for Oct. 2013 and the we got a reduced price for our stay and the money we spent for the 3 day weekend will be credited back to our wedding fund. I was happy I did my site visit as I got to meet my onsite wedding planner and really got to make some decisions about locations and decor. We also got to do a food and cake tasting which was great for picking our dinner menu for our reception. I didn't end up getting a room block through the resort as they were a little higher than I wanted my guests to spend. At the same time I was becoming familiar with BDW and found they had travel agents that came highly recommended and reached out to Wendy Hicks from The Wright Tavel Agency. She got me much better quotes than booking directly through the resort and with her my guests could pay over a year in payments. She has been great to work with and definitely made the booking process for me and all my guests super easy. I recommend booking through a travel agent you don't want to have to deal with booking all of your guests directly through the resort. I still get all of my free events and perks even though I went through a travel agent. My booking deadline has passed now and we have 40 confirmed guests which is the perfect number for me. Booking Flights I booked my flights about 10 months in advance and we are flying first class we got really great prices on our flight it came out to $700 each person. We also get 2 check in bags each at 70 pounds which will come in handy for all our decor. We got a really good price since we booked it so far in advanced. I highly recommend booking as early as possible to get the best price. Also sign up for Kayak alerts to keep your guests in the know when prices drop, I would get alerts every morning and would tell my guests when the price went down and then they would buy their flights. They really appreciated me letting them know. Money saving tips Ways I've been saving money here and there has been to 1. do a lot of DIY 2. Long engagement to pay things throughout the year 3. Use a coupon whenever possible 4. Open up an airline credit card, we have been using our United card for everything wedding related and have racked up so many points that we have enough for our honeymoon flight and hotel. 5. I also do some surveys online and get amazon gift cards and get paid through pay pal (nice way to make extra cash for wedding) 6. I also cleaned out my closet by selling clothes on Tradesy.com I've made over $1,000.00 in less than 8 months just selling clothes that have been sitting in my closet not being worn plus I get rid of clutter. 7. Working a lot of overtime. All these have helped me save for our wedding and helped us get everything we want and dreamed of without going into debt. Its tough paying for a wedding with no help but you can make it happen just have to be smart. Save the Dates After securing the wedding date and room rates we sent out our save the dates in July of 2013. I bought our STD on Magnetstreet.com and they came out really cute. They were magnet save the dates and we sent them out about 14 months before the wedding. They were about $110 with a coupon for 75 STD. Wedding Invitations Our invitations were also from magnetstreet.com and they were free we actually won a contest for free invitations and we saved about $400 on 75 invitations. We don't really have a theme of the wedding but I really like the classic mexican tile look so that's what we went with and our wedding colors of turquoise, coral and champagne with touches of gold. The wedding invites were sent out in Feb. of 2014, 7 months before the wedding and right around tax time which helped a lot with people booking. lol DIY Welcome Bags For my welcome bags I wanted something that was nice and useful but not too expensive. I was going to buy them on Etsy at first but knew I could get the same kind of bag I was looking at for much cheaper. I ended up buying canvas bags from bagiva.com I bought 40 bags for $50 and my graphic artist brother in law made a design for me. I bought iron on paper from Michaels with coupons for $30 and ironed on the design to the canvas bags. The bags cost me $80 for 40 and now all my guests get a bag. For the hangover kits I bought most of my stuff from Sally's beauty supply in their travel section and used coupons for everything, they take bed bath and beyond coupons. I also bought stuff at the dollar store and at target. In the hangover kits I included gum, sunblock, aloe vera, shout wipes, band aids, tissues, moist napkins and advil. I bought clear bags from the dollar store and used card stock to make the hangover tags and got the template from BDW and tweaked it a bit. Total for all the hangover kits it came out to $100 for all 40 kits. I'm also putting door hangers that I made with extra cardstock in each bag, welcome letters and sunglasses. Gifts for Bridal Party For my bridesmaids I wanted to do the cool hangers with each person name on it but it was more than I wanted to spend for a hanger that was only going to be used for my wedding. So I bought wood hangers from walmart for about $10 and then bought stickers for names and my wedding date from Etsy for about $30. I also wanted to do bridal party shirts but again they were more than I wanted to spend so I bought the shirts and then got iron on appliques from Etsy and made my own shirts. I also bought my girls flip flops, emergency kits, etched shot glasses and jewelry boxes with their initials. The flip flops I bought on Amazon with my amazon gift card that I got from my surveys, emergency kits I bought over the blackfriday weekend with a coupon and the jewelry boxes I bought on sale from pottery barn and I used a gift card I also earned from my surveys. All the gifts for the bridal party will be put in the welcome bags. For the guys my fiance got them leather catchalls with their initials also from pottery barn and on sale and we used a gift card I earned through my surveys. In the catchalls we are putting shot glasses that I etched, nice razors and monogrammed cigar holders. We are also putting flip flops in their welcome bags.