Are save the dates necessary?

If most of your guests are traveling I would say Save the Dates would be nice. I wouldn't say they're necessary but if people need to make travel plans it's nice to have the date and location there in front of them.

My cousin is getting married in August and I just got her Save the Date yesterday so I would say if you're going to send them to do so as soon as you can.

I don't know if everyone does but we did. We sent them to everyone who was getting an invitation.

Yes, you need to send Save the Dates, especially for a destination wedding. However they don't need to be formal at all. We did our STDs via email. You could even text people the info (as simple as "Save the Date! We're getting married on DATE at LOCATION and we'd love you to be there. Here's the link to our wedding website where you can find more details: WEBSITE. Formal invitation to follow!"). It doesn't need to be a beautifully designed physical card, but you do want to make sure EVERY guest on your list has all the necessary info at least 5-6 months before your wedding especially if they need to make travel plans.

Agreed with others; you're sending out invitations way too early.

We had a fairly short engagement (engaged in January, married in October) and sent our STDs within a month of our engagement (you can get pretty cheap ones online) and then did our invitations in August.

While we got married in our hometown (which is out of state for us), we still had a lot of traveling guests, so it's good to give that kind of heads up in case people need to take off an extra day or two from work or if they need to save for a hotel, etc.

We did save the dates, bridal shower and then wedding invites. So we did our save the dates in January (maybe the first week of Feb, can't remember), I think the bridal shower ones were sent out maybe a month before the event (july) and I did invitations in August.

I personally don't think they are necessary. Having said that, we did end up sending Save the Dates because I wanted to frame it along with our invitations. It was more of a keepsake for me. Half of our guests came from out-of-state and we sent their Save the Dates seven months before our wedding. Local guests got theirs six months before our wedding. We had a small guest list so ordering them did not break our budget. One of my friends did an e-mail Save the Dates and I thought that was a great idea. She used Paperless Post on hers. She had a destination wedding and she sent hers six months before her wedding. If you decide to do Save the Dates, you should probably send them out very soon.