I love my older sister. She is an amazing lady and so far the best Maid of Honor ever. I honestly don’t know where she finds all these cool websites that I’ve never heard of before but God bless her for it! Her latest find is a site called postable.com. Now, as I mentioned in my post about free wedding websites, I definitely plan on sending out paper invitations for my wedding, but the thing is, I don’t have anyone’s address besides my parents. That’s where postable.com comes in. Basically, it gives you a link that you email to everyone, that link tells them to type in their address, that address is automatically put into a virtual address book for you, and voila! Easy-peasy. Obviously this won’t be much help to you if you don’t have everyone’s email addresses or some of your guests don’t own a computer (like my grandparents), but that’s when a good old-fashioned phone call comes in.

Hope this helps some of you! And if you aren’t getting hitched soon, how about Christmas cards? I’ve never sent out Christmas cards before but I’ve always wanted to. I’m thinking this year might be the year I start though. I’m thinking a portrait of my BF and I, ugly Christmas sweaters, 80s style poses, the whole shebang.

One last thing, and this has absolutely nothing to do with mailing addresses. I went wedding dress shopping this weekend at Bryan’s Bride and I GOT A DRESS! After trying on maybe 10 or so dresses, it was the second one I tried on that I picked, and the super nice consultant threw in a veil for FREE! Woohoo! Two more things I can cross of my to-do list.

-Mo’ Houses out!

Image: mnWaRpq/rgbstock

I’m giving full credit to my mom for the great idea of doing a pre-shopping trip for wedding dresses a few weekends ago. I was compiling a list of stores in New Westminster, and after reading a bunch of reviews about some of the stores, I started feeling overwhelmed and confused as to where I should book an appointment. What if my perfect wedding dress is in one of those stores with a bad review? Should I just ignore the reviews and book an appointment or not risk it? Another sucky thing about wedding dress shopping is most stores are closed on Sundays and do not recommend appointments on Saturdays because that’s their busiest day. Basically, that forces you to book off a day of work to go wedding dress shopping during the middle of the week. Umm…hell no! I love shopping but it sure ain’t worth one of my precious vacation days!

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The other day, when looking for DIY wedding decor ideas, I happened to find this little gem of a diagram, which goes through all of the top wedding trends of 2012. I love diagrams, I don’t know why but they just make me happy. What I loved about this particular diagram is that it shows that less is more is in!

So, I guess my idea for a rustic themed wedding is anything but original, but I didn’t just choose it because I like how it looks. Rustic means nature, or rather stuff I can find in nature for free. Painting stones with everyone’s names on them, making a centrepiece with found driftwood, buying in-season wildflowers instead of expensive out-of-season flowers from a greenhouse: these are all ways to make your wedding look authentically rustic.

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I’ve mentioned before that my BF and I have been together for a while now, so as much as his proposal on Christmas was a surprise, I knew a proposal was imminent. I mean, for about a year prior while I was living with my roommate I had been covertly gathering photos of wedding dresses, cakes and invitation designs and putting them in a secret folder on my computer. Now, at the time I didn’t think I was some crazy wannabe-bride planning her whole wedding before he even put a ring on it, but as it turns out, I think I was.  How did I come to this conclusion you may ask? Well, while doing a bit of research on free wedding websites for this blog post I stumbled upon a wedding website I had apparently already made and forgot about. Looking at when I registered for an account on this particular site, I’m pretty sure I made it about a year ago. Oh god. I’m everything I hate. I blame TLC and every wedding reality show I’ve ever seen.

Ok, back to the subject at hand, free wedding websites. There are a ton of them, and even though I apparently already made one for myself a year ago, looking back it may not have been the best site out there.

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Now, I’ve been to about four wedding fairs since I got engaged on Christmas, so I feel like I’ve pretty much seen it all. The first one I went to, The Wedding Fair, was chaotic. There were hundreds of vendors and a million brides with entourages elbowing their way through the crowd to enter each booth’s prize draw. I had a fun time but I think I could only do one or two of those tops. Next, I went to the Engage Bridal Show at the Vancouver Club and that was probably the fanciest fair I’ve ever been too. There was a string quartet, servers offering everyone champagne, and the gift bags were definitely worth showing up for. After that I went to a very small show at the Loden Hotel in downtown Vancouver, which was more of a showcase of one of their suites you could have a small yet elegant wedding for about 40 people in. Surprisingly it wasn’t as astronomically expensive as I thought, with their base package priced at about $11,000, but that includes the ceremony, reception, food, drinks, flowers, well basically the whole shebang.

Today, I went to my fourth and probably final wedding fair (for a while anyway). It was the Vancouver Wedding & Honeymoon Spring Show put on by the same people as The Wedding Fair. Expecting it to be a repeat of The Wedding Fair, I was pleasantly surprised at how relaxed the vibe was in comparison. It was a smaller venue held at the Vancouver Convention Centre East, there were less exhibitors, and less crowds. It was honestly such a relief to be able to walk through all of the aisles and not bump into anyone, plus it took me and my friend no time at all to enter all the prize draws. After we wandered through all the booths, we stayed for the fashion show which is always a fun time. My fingers are crossed to win something this time around, seeing as my chances might be better with a smaller number of entries to compete against. All I want is a trip to Cancun, is that so much to ask for?

Anyways, after the fair I couldn’t resist wandering into Holt Renfrew to check out some possible wedding shoes. I’ve given myself a $200 budget for shoes just because I’ve never owned an expensive pair of shoes in my life so I think I deserve to splurge a little. That’s where these beauties come in (excuse my pink feet and the fact that this photo was taken in my bathroom).

Sparkly, golden champagne colour, super high heel so I might even be the same height as my hubby-to-be, and I found them for only $120 at Town Shoes. I am absolutely in love with these, but I know it might be a big mistake buying the shoes before the dress. Thoughts?

-Mo’ Houses out!

As you know I’ve been starting to plan my wedding and in the process I’ve become obsessed with two amazing wedding sites: WeddingWire.com and TheKnot.com. I’ll be honest, I may have already registered for accounts with both of these websites before I got engaged, but it was merely for research purposes, I swear! I did wait until after the proposal to go out and buy any wedding magazines, that’s something right? Like an hour after the proposal. Whatever, I couldn’t help myself! I just want to say yes to the dress, is that so wrong?!

Okay, moving on, so the other day I was on The Knot’s site and stumbled upon an article called Wedding Problems: 10 Questions from Wedding Guests You Don’t Need to Answer. Sure, technically I don’t need to give these people an answer for their inappropriate questions, but if someone does ask me one of these questions I am sure as hell not gonna keep my mouth shut. If you are rude enough to ask the question, then you better be prepared for my answer. So, for a bit of fun I thought I would go through the list of questions and provide answers for all them. Brace yourself, I wrote this while feeling particularly sassy, stressed out over wedding planning, and a bit tipsy from some cheap wine. But, since this is first and foremost a personal finance blog, I thought I would also include some frugal answers with money saving tips to help any of you ladies (or gents) out there too:

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As soon as I changed my relationship status from “in a relationship” to “engaged” on Facebook, within seconds all of the ads on my sidebar changed from shoes and make-up to wedding photographers and weight-loss. I mean, I expected that to happen but god Facebook can be super creepy sometimes! Anywho, I’m pretty good at ignoring all of Facebook’s ads, but I couldn’t help but feel compelled to click on the ad for Weddingful. With the tagline “Save 50% - 70% off of your wedding” how could I resist? That being said, since I am a true skeptic of all things that sound too good to be true, I thought I’d do a bit of research on this apparent fairy godmother of wedding deals and here’s what I found:

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