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Arts & Entertainment

Sachem Alum Blogs it Out: L.I. Bride On a Budget

The wedding experience is different for everyone, why not share it?

Planning a wedding for your closest friends and family in a particular way that fully expresses the love you and your partner have for one another is typically every girls dream.

However, when the time comes, it can grow to be a tiresome chore full of stress, anxiety and one too many choices. The planning process becomes especially hard when you un-expectedly relocate from Long Island to North Carolina and are working with a budget of $15,000 for 150 people.

Taking advantage of the immediacy of media today, bride-to-be Ariella Monti has armed herself with a wedding blog to vent, seek advice and, along the way, organize the big day. 

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The Sachem grad and her fiancé decided to pack up and head south to take advantage of professional opportunities. Nights before, the magical proposal happened at their favorite restaurant, Trish's Cafe in Babylon Village.  Having both friends and family in New York, the couple is planning a Long Island wedding from 500 miles away. Writing about the situation seemed the most natural to Monti, who feels planning her traditional Long Island wedding on a budget makes her circumstances unique.

"I've always had a love of writing and always felt the need to express myself," said Monti. "As a writer, you always hope that your thing is the 'next big thing,' but realistically, I thought at the very least my friends and family would enjoy it."

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Monti indulged in the rising trend of citizen journalism after reading a woman's pregnancy blog that became a big success.  Knowing she would eventually be engaged to her now fiancé, Chuck, and on her way to planning a low budget wedding, she embraced her skills with the blog.

"Well, if this woman can write a blog about being pregnant and it become a hit, I could write a blog about planning a wedding on a budget," said Monti. "So, I figured once I got engaged I would begin writing it and see what happened; planning from North Carolina was the icing on the cake."

The basic premise behind the blog was to share her experience as well as helpful hints to girls who were in a similar position. However low the blog hits are, averaging about 20 per post, they have generated enough to make the blog worth her time.  

Monti doesn't plan her blog, so the posts are subjects that come throughout the course of her daily life and the wedding planning. Picking up after her fiancé was the inspiration for a post called "The Pros of Sin," a thread about living together before marriage. A comment during a call from her future mother-in-law about the difficulties of having a beachside wedding prompted one of her latest, "Unleashing My Inner Bridezilla," which was about making sacrifices for your guests. 

"I'm not an expert on wedding planning and I never claim to be; I'm just a bride who enjoys writing about her experiences and I tend to do it in a blunt and honest fashion," said Monti. "I'm definitely not the David Tutera for the bride on a budget, but I hope that I can offer something to help another bride even if it's just being a voice of someone in the same boat."

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