Essential or Extra? - Save the dates

Essential. Just sending an invite a month or two beforehand is short notice IMO. I'm sending my save the dates 10 months before my wedding.

Essential for us. Everyone makes plans really early in our families and our wedding was on a Friday so guests needed to know to save a vacation day if they had to travel to us

Save the Dates we used for our guests who we wanted to invite but were told ahead of time they wouldn’t make it. And everyone else receive an invitation.
We are also not having a ceramony but instead just doing a reception where we can all party the day after we go to City Hall. Which leads to ceramony programs - definitely extra.
Favors/Welcome Bags - Extra.
But engagement photos, videography, signature drinks, and dessert options are a MUST HAVE for us.

Essential definitely

I can see both sides: if you send the invites out early enough, you don't need Save-the-Dates. But if you send the actual invites so early, you risk people loosing them, which makes more follow-up work later. If you send the invites at the "traditional" time without Save-the-Dates, then you risk too many guests already having plans.

Essential for us because of our out of town guests, but we only sent them out to those out of town. Also essential if you picked a holiday weekend!

Probably essential- we are thinking about moving our date slightly closer to the holidays so we want to give people as much of a heads up as possible!

I think they essential, especially when the wedding has a lot of out of town guests, requires travel (such as destination wedding), or takes place around a holiday. Our wedding is 7 months after the proposal so we skipped the Save the Dates and sent the invitations a little early.

A must I want to know exactly who is coming and how to prepare, most importantly my budget.

For a wedding that has enough advance notice and has a large OOT guest list, I think they are essential. For small weddings like ours with a less than 6 month engagement, it's extra.

100% essential!!

Essential. We have quite a few out of town guests & our wedding is on a Friday, so we wanted to give advance notice.

For me, extra. My parents helped spread the word to family and we told all our close friends right when we picked a date. We don't think we are even going to do engagement pictures bc we dont know what we would use the photos for.

Completely extra... We aren't even going to be sending out STD... We are having a small intimate wedding only close family and friends. They all know the date. So instead of spending the money on that we can put it to something that is essential. Like the honeymoon.

Essential. We are having a destination wedding so we needed to get the date out in front of everyone asap

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Hi Amanda! This makes perfect sense with your super intimate wedding. That's so great and your wedding day will be so beautiful! Where will you be honeymooning?

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Hi Mich906! Makes sense Where is your special destination? And how many people are you inviting?

We personally contacted everyone that we wanted to come. I knew that out of everyone we invited, only 1/4th would show up so I didn’t want to spend all that money on people who I knew wouldn’t show but that I wanted to invite.

Save the dates are essential

Essential! We have guests all over -- NH, MA, VT, TX, FL just to name some -- so this will be important to us to share our date for family and friends to give them time to plan ahead for traveling.