Love

Free Date Ideas: Fun Dates At No Cost!

Dating is an important part of any relationship…especially if you’ve been together for a long time. It’s crucial to have quality time together as much as possible, and we always recommend couples try to shoot for a date night once a week.

But, dating can also get expensive depending on what you do each week. So we like to mix in different types of dates and we do lots of free dates throughout the year to help keep our budget in tact.

We’ve come up with some great Free Date Ideas you can do to save money and still have some quality time together.

Family Christmas Traditions For Couples To Start

The Christmas season is my absolute favorite time of the year. And I think the main reason is because of all the family Christmas Traditions I grew up with. My parents always made sure that Christmas time was a season and not just one day, so the joy was spread throughout the whole month.

Some of our Christmas traditions are/were cheesy and some we just can’t go a Christmas without.

Now being newly married, we’re navigating a new way to have Christmas Traditions for Couples, and also figuring out what we will want to do when we have kids of our own.

Advice From Brides Who Have Been There- Urban Wedding

1.  Decide what aspects of the wedding you want to splurge on and where you can save. 

Early on in the wedding planning, we decided what aspects of the wedding were the most important to us. From there, we decided what we were going to need to spend the most money on and where we could cut corners. For example, we both decided we wanted a venue in downtown Chicago that was unique, so we allocated a large portion of our budget towards that. For the things that weren’t as important to us, such as, invitations, we saved money by going the DIY route. I made the invitations using a template off of Etsy and printed them on Vistaprint, which saved us tons! 

Bride Advice – Backyard Wedding

1. Please, LISTEN and remind yourself often when people tell you not to stress the small things. I heard that so many times while wedding planning and I shrugged it off thinking my problems were too large, expensive and nobody else could possibly understand, yadda yadda. There is so much build up and stress while wedding planning, that on the day of your wedding just give up pleasing anyone but you and your future husband. Throw it out the window because if others aren’t making sure things run smooth for you, chances are it was suppose to be another way for a reason and you’ll have no choice but to roll with it. It is suppose to be FUN and memorable for the right reasons.

Advice For Brides Having A Courthouse Wedding -plus Beautiful Courthouse Wedding Dresses

My partner and I plan to get married in Iceland on June 5th, 2019. However, we wanted to do a private service one year prior so that certain family members who may not make it to Iceland could attend our marriage. We also thought that might help with the legalities of getting married in another country. We decided to get married exactly one year prior on June 5th, 2018 downtown Chicago at the courthouse.

Advice From Brides Who Have Been There

1.  DO NOT go over the top on lighting and small details, no one pays attention to your napkins or your table runners (although mine HAD to match the sweetheart table perfectly.)  People notice the love, the atmosphere, the energy, not the forks and knives.

6 Ways to Save on Wedding Planning

Getting married is absolutely one of the happiest times and events of your entire life. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most expensive. Unless your plan is to go the way of a simple courthouse wedding, you’ll find yourself with expenses that you didn’t even know were customary when it comes to weddings. There are so many things that go into a wedding that you don’t realize until you find yourself in the position of planning your wedding. A wedding dress, dresses for the bridal party, a tux, flowers, venue, catering, and drinks are just the beginning.

Our Engagement Story

We’re starting the New Year out with a bang…and a ROCK!! 

A quick little backstory about the day…I had a photo shoot booked in the city (in Chicago), with a photographer that reached out to me through the blog.  He was in town for the weekend, and asked if I was up to collaborate on a shoot.  I get a lot of random inquiries from people reaching out to me on IG or the blog…but this photographer had some really nice shots, and the timing worked out, so I decided to do a collab with him.  I thought it would be an awesome opportunity to get some nice shots of Bart and I in the city before he moves to California.  So we set it up for January 1st, which was the only day we could actually make it out to the city, since Bart had to work the next couple days.