Wedding Guests: who to invite? (Part 1)

While you may have been hoping for a painless process, let’s face it, prioritizing friends, parents’ friends, and peripheral guests for your wedding is never going to be an easy task. You had might as well reconcile yourself now with the fact that you are going to upset some people – whether or not they voice their pain to you or keep it to themselves, some people are going to end up miffed. A classic example, of course, is when someone assumes that their invitation is “plus one” when – in fact - it is not. It is simply not possible to please all of the people all of the time.

As you plan your wedding, it’s important to remember that a small guest list will help to keep your costs down, right from the beginning. The fixed cost element of every wedding – e.g. the venue hire, the cars, the wedding dress etc. is not going to vary wildly with number of guests who attend. But the variable cost factor can send your budget through the roof. Put simply, more people = more plates = more tablecloths = more invites = more everything! And the prices add up really fast and can spiral out of control even more quickly!

This all may seem obvious in the abstract sense, but the costs carry over in unlikely ways. For example, how many additional people do you have to invite before you have to add a whole extra table (and other people to fill it up) so that people aren’t sitting by themselves? Adding four more people could require setting up a new table, with an additional set of rental items: another centerpiece, another tablecloth and yet more chairs. All told, eliminating twenty “non-essential” people could save you hundreds, if not thousands of pounds from your budget.

 

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