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Wedding Magazine Budgeting The guest crunch
| The guest crunch |
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| Wedding Magazine - Budgeting |
 Oh the stress of the guest list! Nothing has such potential to cause a squabble among friends and family as who you invite and who you don’t. Be it your preference for an intimate wedding, the constraints of the budget, or you may simply have fallen in love with a tiny venue.You may well find that your parents are the main offenders of the expanding guest list, especially if they are contributing to the cost of your do. Arrange to spend some time with them to tactfully make it clear why a smaller wedding is important or necessary, and hopefully this should bring about a compromise. So how do you go about reducing the amount of people on your guest list?  Exclude children… a tactful excuse is to blame the wedding venue for this. If you are excluding children, give as much notice as you can so that parents may be able to come round to the idea of this and arrange care while they are attending your wedding. This may of course mean that some parents will not be able or inclined to attend, so you need to focus on who this will actually be affecting.Inviting workmates can be problematic, you should either invite all of your immediate colleagues or none at all as it can cause ill feeling in the workplace prior and post wedding. It is acceptable to invite friends and not their partners, but this can only really be achieved if your social circle is such that nobody is attending the wedding without comfortably knowing some of the other guests. Should you desire a small amount of guests at the actual wedding, then it may be best to invite just family to the ceremony, and  perhaps have a larger gathering at the evening reception. Friends are often easygoing about this arrangement. Should you wish to have your very closest friends at the ceremony then include them into the bridal party by making them attendants and ushers.A wedding held at a location away from home is also a good way of keeping the numbers down. It is unlikely that anyone not closely related to you or in your close social circuit will want to travel and make overnight arrangements simply to attend a wedding. Should you crave a large wedding with all your friends and family attending but simply not be able to afford putting on a fancy sit down meal and evening buffet, then one idea is to hold the ceremony later in the day. Vows can be taken no later than 6pm, so a wedding held in the late afternoon would mean dispensing with the afternoon formal sit down meal and going straight to the evening meal, this can reduce your wedding costs by a couple of thousand pounds in many instances.  If it only the size of the ceremony venue that means keeping numbers down, then it is acceptable to only invite people to your reception, but the wedding must be designed to make the evening guests feel just as special as the day guests if possible making sure they are there for big moments such as speeches, first dance and cake cutting.Most people understand if you can’t fit them in, but if you aren’t going to include them in you’re actual day, then avoid including them in talking about your wedding plans. |