Wedding Invitations & Paper

When did you send save the dates?

I'm hearing conflicting time frames. I've heard from ASAP, as soon as we have a date, to 4-6 months prior. With that being said, I know weddings are different in different regions, so I'm just wondering when you sent or will send yours, thanks!

Also, when did you send out actual invitations?

Re: When did you send save the dates?

  • Save the dates are not necessary, but are nice if it is a destination wedding or there are lots of out of town-ers or something.  STDs are usually sent  between 6 months to 1 year before the wedding.  If it is a destination wedding or you have lots of out of town guests, I think the more time they get to plan, the better.  
    Invitations usually go out 6-8 weeks before the wedding.
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  • doeydo said:

    Save the dates are not necessary, but are nice if it is a destination wedding or there are lots of out of town-ers or something.  STDs are usually sent  between 6 months to 1 year before the wedding.  If it is a destination wedding or you have lots of out of town guests, I think the more time they get to plan, the better.  
    Invitations usually go out 6-8 weeks before the wedding.

    This. Invite guidelines are much more strict. 6-8 weeks is the universal norm.

    STDs are more open to interpretation (but should truly only be sent after your date, venue, and officiant are 100% secured). Ours went out about 7.5 months in advance.

  • Thank you. We have all 3 of those secured and have a large amount of out of state guests. We were thinking about a year, maybe 13 month or so before, but we don't want them to go out so early that they get misplaced or something.
  • We sent our STDs about 8-9 months prior to the wedding. Many of our guests were OOT so we wanted to give them time to make travel arrangements. Invitations went out like normal at the 5-6 week mark.
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  • JMalettasJMalettas member
    First Anniversary First Answer First Comment 5 Love Its
    edited November 2013
     We also had a large majority of our guests OOT. We sent our save-the-dates a year before the wedding. (With venue & officiant, obviously, 100% secured). We also wanted to make sure they wouldn't be lost, with sending them out a little earlier, so we had them made into fridge magnets! They turned out awesome, & we had a lot of positive feedback from guests! Maybe something to look into as well! :)

     *J
  • STDs should go out 6-9 months ahead of the wedding.

    More than a year is much too soon.  You will create unnecessary confusion, and people will lose them.  
  • starke87 said:
    Thank you. We have all 3 of those secured and have a large amount of out of state guests. We were thinking about a year, maybe 13 month or so before, but we don't want them to go out so early that they get misplaced or something.
    Send the STDs at 9 months.  
  • Thanks so much! We have our magnets made, I think we're going to wait until after the new year since people pretty much get bombarded around this time of year anyway.
  • We are doing a destination wedding so we sent out our save the dates about 6.5 mo. before the wedding as people would need to make travel plans.  However, I did informally tell my family members when we booked the venue so that all could start planning/budgeting as needed.  I would suggest no less than 3-4mo. before the wedding since, inevitably, someone will be traveling for it.  
  • We're getting married in October and we just mailed our STDs. We are from NY and have family coming from CA, CO, AZ, IL, IN, PA, NC, SC, and MD. So thats a lot of traveling. Plus a few of them are in the military. The more heads up the better sometimes, and sometimes you just cant plan on the military to cooperate at all. Also, our line of work requires us to put vacation days in by the end of November. Some of our friends are also co-workers and they can now plan ahead of time. I also wanted to publicly "claim the date" at work. 5 other couples have gotten engaged within the last month at our company, many of us have overlapping friends. So for us it was sooner than later. 


    Look at the social circumstances regarding your wedding. Just don't send anything out between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Its bound to get lost. 

  • We just sent our out about 2 weeks ago, 9 months away from the big day.  We wanted to make sure that they were delivered before the holidays so that it did not get mixed in with holiday cards.
  • We sent our STDs out one year in advance and will be sending our invitations three months in advance as we are getting married in a popular resort community in the height of the summer season.
  • We sent our Save the Date's (I just can't call them STDs) out by email about 10 months before the wedding date.  I know that is a little earlier than etiquette dictates, but we have a large number of people we are inviting who live out of state and we wanted to give them maximum planning time if they were going to be able to attend.  Further, our venue will only hold 10 hotel rooms at a time (once that block is booked, they will add another 10, and so on) so we wanted to give people who knew for sure that they were coming plenty of time to register for a room before the hotel started getting non-wedding bookings.
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