Had a question regarding guest lists.

Wedqueen12

I'm new to theknot.com and was just wondering what the protocol was when it comes to drafting a guest list for invitations? I also wasnt sure whether or not if someone is in the BRIDAL party as to whether or not they get an invitation? 

Some help woudl be greatly appreciated. 

achiduck

WP members still get an inviation, so do parents, grandparents, etc.

We started by making a list of everyone we would want there if cost was not a factor that would fit in the space (note that vendors, photographer, DJ, etc, need to be included in the head count for safety purposes). Then we looked at our budget and started eliminating - people we hadn't seen/talked to in more than a year, people we felt we had to invite but didn't really want to, etc, etc and were left with 140 guests that we invited. Could we have cut more? Absolutely, but we really wanted all those people to be there and were able to comfortably afford that many.

[Deleted User]

One hard lesson I learned, don't invite more people then you can afford to show up. I had a very large list of courtesy invites that I had to send. The list included relatives who lived over seas, relatives who live out of state & distant relatives who had to be invited because rest of family was but they won't come. Well out of the 153 people that we invited, the final count was 120. 80% of the courtesy invites decide to come. So it threw off our number from what we were planning on having & put us in a pinch financially.

Wedqueen12

Thank you all of your responses have helped tremendously. And to answer your question Sleeper2013 only my parents are contributing he has no idea who his father is and his mother and most of his other relatives are deceased. It's rough but we are making the best out of things.