Did I get this right?

[sealavender 0]

Hi everyone,

A friend of mine is about to begin the AOS process from F1 visa based on marriage, and she is pretty clueless as to how to go about doing everything. She turned to me for help, as I have successfully completed my own AOS process back in 2010, and I promised I would try my best to help her. The first thing I did was routing her to this forum, as well as the AOS guides and checklists. There are some other details which might not have been addressed, or difficult to find on the forum, however, and I have given her answers to the best of my knowledge but I would like to double check with you so that I can avoid making it more complicated than it needs to be for them.

She is currently a community college student, but will graduate at the end of May. She and her now husband have gotten a city hall wedding back in November 2011 after 3 years of dating, and got their certificate. They will have a civil wedding at the end of August for family and friends, for which her mother will be flying in from Vietnam to attend. Her original plan was to wait for her August wedding to be over, and then send out the AOS package immediately. To my understanding, she will be out of status 60 days after her graduation, which will be sometime at the end of July, and sending her AOS package after the August wedding will make her out of status for 1-1.5 month. Now from reading this forum, I learned that many people successfully AOS with much longer out of status period. However, since Vietnam is a high fraud country, I thought it is best to avoid being out of status all together, and so I let her know that she can apply for OPT right now so that she can prolong her legal stay in the US, and give herself enough time after her wedding to file for AOS. The reason she wants to wait until after the August wedding is in order to send photos of them and her mother together as secondary evidence, but other than that, I think everything else is in order. The only thing is, OPT will not be useful other than for the reason above, since she will be too busy and stressed out for her wedding and AOS to actually start looking for work as an international student, and applying for it it will set her back around 400 bucks (from my recollection from when I applied myself). My question is : will it be excessive to apply for OPT just so she won't have to be out of status for 1-1.5 month before sending in her package ? or is her current time plan perfectly okay without OPT? I would hate for her to spend 400 for nothing, but I would hate it more if by trying to save some money, she will run into more problems down the road.

On a related note, they are going to have a traditional wedding in Vietnam in January, so I told her to apply for AP just in case. If she applies at the end of August, what is the chance that she will have AP before the end of the year, assuming no RFE's?

Thanks for your help!