Guest list

We cut kids- that saved us 30 heads on our catering count.

I wanted 70-80 but I have a groomzilla 🤣🤣 he wants all the bells and whistles— o would say cut kids our first then maybe plus ones if they don’t have a significant other

Cutting out kids, leaving your guest list current - don't invite people you haven't spoken to or seen in years, etc.

If you haven't seen or communicated with them in a year, I think you'll be okay cutting them. Another thing to consider is whether or not you would invite these people to a party at your home!

We are trying to get to that number as well but FH had 180 people on his list alone. We cut kids first, then limited plus ones. Next step was to reduce out of town invites. My fiance still has a ton of people so we will be going through and looking at lease contacted next. Good luck!

Once we decided to keep it to around 50 people, including ourselves, we decided that each of us would be able to pick 24 people (including plus ones) for our list. Mine has a lot of family on it, but we aren't inviting kids so that helped. Main criteria is that we both know them and they are active in our lives. We've been together for almost 8 years so we honestly had no issues deciding who to invite. I have a huge family and he isn't close to many of his extended family so we are only inviting my immediate family and a few cousins that we are close to. Originally we got up to about 75 without my second cousins (which total about 30 more) so we had to cut it off. Both of us have many friends who have been so supportive of us and involved with us throughout the relationship that it was most important to us to celebrate the day with them, not extended family that we only see once a year if that. I know our situation won't work for everyone. My parents ended up paying for the addition of the extended family at my brother's wedding 5 years ago but they also had a huge wedding with no limitation of space because it was at his friend's ranch so it was literally adding a couple of tables and additional count for the caterers. Good luck to you!

How did you decide to downsize your guestlist, Alaina?