Choosing your wedding guestlist

By Linds | March 4, 2008

Deciding who to invite to your wedding can be very challenging. You'll want to have all of your friends and family present, but some things can limit inviting everyone you know. Budget tends to be the biggest limiting factor. Once you calculate dinner and drinks and favors for everyone, you're looking at upwards of $100 a head. By limiting the number of people, you can save a ton of money, but sometimes at the expense of people's feelings.

Another big challenge is space. Will your ceremony and reception venues hold enough people?

Lastly, you may just have family or friends who don't always gel. For example, did two people just break up and want to come, but with their new dates? Now you've gone from 2 happy people to 4 people who would rather not be in the same room. Not to mention divorced families and battling inlaws!!!

Here are some tips to help you design a guestlist:

- Start by writing down EVERYONE you'd like to invite. Include even those that are acquaintances and low probability, just to get names down on paper and brainstorm so you don't forget anyone.

-Now, start classifying each name with a category. I recommend the following scheme:

1) Definitely going to invite

Tally up your definites. At this point you have to compare to your budget and space.
You may have to decrease this number further by regrouping everyone by priority.

2) Maybe

For those guests in the "maybe" category, I offer a few suggestions:

a) Determine if the both the bride and groom feel the same way?

b.) Will feelings be hurt by not inviting someone?

c.) If you play on a sports team or club, it can be difficult to draw the line, but impossible to invite the entire team or club. I had this dilemma and invited only those who had either been to my house (or I had been to theirs) or those who I hung out with regularly outside of the club.

d.) Can you afford to invite everyone?

3) Unlikely

Maybe send out a second wave of invitations if a bunch of people say no.

** Please note: Statistics show that approximately 20-25% of wedding guests will not attend the wedding, and as you increase the distance, the rate of attendance also decreases.

No matter who you invite in the end, what matters is the happiness of the bride and groom. You should feel like you are surrounded by all of the important people in your life on your special day. Once you have it figured out, time to send out some invitations!

Don't know what information to write on your invitations? Stay tuned for my next blog!