You’d never know it, but all of the paper that goes into announcing a wedding and thanking people can add up to a small fortune.

You can save money - and a few trees in the process. As you’d expect, it is possible these days to use your home computer and printer to do much of the heavy lifting. Add in some good quality card/paper stock and it’s really easy to achieve a professional look at a fraction of the cost.

We’re Engaged: There’s no need to send out engagement notices these days. Pick up the phone, and consider that your “engagement notice.” Better still, embrace the internet and send out an email to everyone you know! Reserve paper notices for members of your family that belong to the older generation

“Save The Date” cards: This is one thing that has made its way over the pond from our American cousins and they are becoming increasingly popular in the UK. While the older generation might say that Save The Date cards are largely unnecessary, they can be useful if you are inviting people who will need to travel long distances or if you want to get a better idea of who cannot make it well in advance of your big day. A simple, elegant postcard announcing the who, the what, the when and the where will give your friends ample time to plan ahead and – if need be – book time off work and make travel arrangements long before the official invitation will arrive. If you’d like to save money down the line, it is a good idea to enclose all the nitty-gritty logistical information e.g. hotels, maps, and fun local activities at this stage. Though it may require more work earlier in the process, it’s cheaper to mail this information along with your “Save The Date” card than with your invitation, because invitations tend to be heavier and, therefore, postage is generally more expensive.

Here are a couple of handy hints:

1. Only invite couples who live together or who are married. Eliminate the “plus one guest” unless you actually know the name of the guest.

2. Invite people whom you want to be a part of your future together, not necessarily people who were part of your past, which is to say, new friends may have more of a place at your wedding than some of your university friends, whom you may feel a vague obligation to invite.

All of this means that deciding on your guest list is one of the first - and most important - things you should do in planning your wedding, as this number is the single most important controllable factor in your wedding budget. Let’s say you’ve run the numbers and you want to invite roughly 90 people (thirty friends, thirty for the Groom’s family, and thirty for the Bride’s family).

Now bear in mind that it is highly unlikely that everyone you invite to your wedding will say yes. As a rule of thumb, approximately 20% of people you invite will politely decline, for one reason or another. The key to getting to the Magic Number of guests you want to be at your wedding is to successfully identify and remove from the list the people who cannot make it as early as possible in the whole process.

Let’s assume that dear old uncle Frank should be invited (he is family, after all) but you don’t really know him and he lives abroad, so he’s highly unlikely to come and you personally would not be too upset if he didn’t make it. You’d rather invite Dan, a guy you use to work with. But the family expects that you send Frank one of your precious invites! What do you do?

Answer: remove Frank from the list early by sending out Save The Date cards as soon as you’ve booked the venue! Save The Date cards are becoming increasingly more popular in the UK. They give information on the date and the venue. Once you have sent them out, you can follow up with the people who you suspect will not be able to make it. So you can call up uncle Frank once he has received his Save The Date card and get a confirmation from him that he will not make it (as you expected). You express regret, but now you don’t have to send him an invite. Instead, you can send out a Save The Date card to Dan - the first person on your reserve list.

Another idea is to explicitly state on the Save The Date card that people should let you know if they know now that they will not be able to make it for any reason (although there is no need to say yes for definite at this stage). This could eventually free up some more space from your 90 places from people who may have already booked holidays or who may have other prior engagements.

If you follow this process outlined above, you can increase the number of people who will accept the final invitations (when you send them out) into the high 90 percent range!

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.