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How to keep your wedding guest list in check


Two important things to remember: 1) The wedding day is about you and your future spouse, and 2) It is impossible to make everyone happy all the time so don’t let other people’s expectations stress you out or stretch your budget. Begin planning your guest list early so you have enough time to consider everyone you’d like to invite. Encourage the love of your life to make a separate list of people he or she would like to invite. If so inclined, you could accommodate your future mother-in-law or other VIP by accepting a list of guests they are recommending, ranked by order of importance. Be sure to inform them that while their list will be carefully considered, not everyone on the list will be invited.

Having a specific vision for your wedding from the get-go can help you when it comes to narrowing down your proposed guest list. Do you want to have an intimate wedding with your closest family and friends or do you want a grand soiree? Will your budget accommodate a grand soiree without breaking the bank? Have you already selected your dream wedding location, and if so, how many people can it accommodate? These are a few basic guidelines to help expedite your invitation plans.

If you feel your preliminary guest list is totally unrealistic, even after narrowing it down based on budget and size, there are other factors you can consider. For example, do you want to include children in your guest list? The blog article, “Guest list rules to help keep your wedding small” on offbeatbride.com offers the two determining factors they used to streamline their guest list: “We ended up coming up with two rules which more or less answered all of our many queries:
  1. Only people who knew both of us decently well and that one, or both, of us cared about immensely.
  2. Definitely not anyone that one of us had never met before.
This worked well, both in helping us making decisions, and as a reason to give people when they asked us why so and so wasn't invited.” Once you have a guest list that fits your size and budget, you can order your invites, hooray! (Tip: Remember to keep a list of people you’d like to invite if space becomes available.)

Lisa Helmanis, author of Getting Married Without a Hitch, recommends ordering your invitations at least four months in advance with an additional twenty-five extras for errors and last-minute invitations. Collecting addresses and filling out envelopes can take a long time, so don’t wait until the last minute to get your invitations ready for the mail. Hold on to some to mail out at a later date. At the point when you start receiving responses for RSVP, you can use your reserve to invite those who had been previously left out. Helmanis advises, “a typical refusal rate runs at around 15-20 percent.”

What ever your dreams for your perfect day . . . we hope they come true!

Sources Used to Write this Article:
Anne. “Guest list rules to help you keep your wedding small.” Offbeatbride.com. 18 Jan 2014. Web. 16 June 2014. < http://offbeatbride.com/2011/01/guest-list-advice>

Helmanis, Lisa. Get Married Without a Hitch. London: The Infinite Ideas Company Limited, 2005. Print.

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