Save-The-Dates...yes or no?!

It's not something you have to do and unless you have a lot of people from out of town, word of mouth should suffice until the wedding invitations go out. Plus you are not getting married during a busy time of the year where people take vacations, etc. I think you will do just fine not sending any out.

However, if you really do want to send them out you can have 100 of them printed up for free at Vistaprint. They have many designs to choose from and all you pay is a small shipping charge. There still would be the expense of postage of course.

I wouldn't do them. They can really add up in a lot of ways... aside from just buying them and mailing them off. A friend of mine over-committed herself by using STD's. She thought they wanted/could afford a wedding for 110 people, so they sent out STD's to those households. Turns out that after 6 months, she decided she wanted a much smaller wedding but was basically trapped by etiquette and had to invite all 110.

Especially on a small budget, I would stick with word of mouth to announce your date to close friends and family and not commit invites until you are actually at the invite stage. I stuck with word of mouth and only sent STDs to close family... and even now there are a couple of people I probably wouldn't be inviting if they hadn't already committed to it. Relationships change!

I'm thinking I'll do save the dates because I have not-so-close cousins who are also getting married but haven't set dates and I want to make sure nobody STEALS MY DATE! I announced it on Facebook but they are young....Will probably do postcards though, and print them myself. I do a lot of digital scrapbooking so I will add our engagement photos to the front.

We did them because we were having a Friday night summer wedding and knew we had some people who'd have to take time off from work if they wanted to attend the ceremony. My cousin also sent them because she got married on July 4th and was afraid people would make vacation reservations if they didn't know what the wedding date was. If you're not in any odd situation like that, you don't need to worry about sending them out.

We did STDs b/c our wedding was OOT for most people and would involve travel. So we wanted to give people a heads up. We mailed them around 7-8 months out.

I think it's nice to get a heads up re: travel and it's also nice to know you're going to be officially invited down the road to help with planning, but it's not necessary. If you want to do them you could always do something electronic like an email or evite or something.

We did them because our wedding was a trip for most of our guests. We did an evite.com save the date though, which allowed us to save on postage and still get the information across. It was also useful to be able to send emails to my guests through evite and notify them of updates on our website as things got going.

I made about 8 physical save the dates to send to older relatives who would not be getting the emails.

We are doing them because there are A LOT of weddings coming up in the near future, and we are having a Friday evening wedding, and have some guests from OOT.

I don't think they're necessary but FH and I did them for a number of reasons:

1) Most of our guests are OOT and we wanted to give them plenty of time to shop for flights and make arrangements for time off work, etc

2) There were several other engaged couples in our family that hadn't set a date and we wanted to "reserve" ours.

I'm not doing them. Most of out guest are local except one couple.

They are definitely not necessary. We chose to do save the dates because about 90% of FH's family lives out of state and wanted to give them ample time to consider wether or not they could afford the trip. I think if the majority of your guests are local then there is no need; and if you want to give out of town guests time to think about it then just call and let them know. If you decide that you want to do save the dates, a great way to cut costs on them is to get postcards from a local landmark (your town, etc...) and write a little note on each one. Cheap to make, cheap to send

Like most of the posters here, I agree that it depends on the kind of wedding you are having. If many guests are form OOT, then yes; if a destination wedding, YES; If you are POSITIVE on who you wish to invite, YES.

That said, I didn't do STD's as I didn't want to be tied to a certain guest list, our wedding is relatively small with close family and friends (70 ppl) and everyone invited is local.

I like the postcard idea above - very creative!

We did them because we are having a destination wedding in Vegas. It was a good way to tell people to start saving up for the trip. Plus I did super in-expensive stuff: A DVD photoslides show of us and did print at home magnets I fgot at Michael's super cheap and easy stuff.

I'd only do them if you are having a lot of out of town guests.

We are doing them for a few of our OOT guest and also because we are getting married on a Friday and they know to take the day off months/weeks in advanced.

As others have said, not really necessary unless you have alot of out of town guests. Consider sending out an email Save the date. There are a lot of sites that offer that for free. Or set up your wedding website and send them out. We designed our own and printed them on vistaprint, although they stopped the free 100 postcards right before I ordered mine, naturally. But still not too bad of a price.

I agree with the others, its a personal choice. I did it right after I got engaged because we live in FL but my FH is Canadian. All of his friends and family live there and I wanted them to have as much time as possible to plan. If you are trying to save money, skip the save the dates and just call out of towners personally to give them a heads up

We did them, but in retrospect I wish I would have saved the money I spent printing and on postage. Most people were confused (is this the actual invitation? where is the rest of the info?) and as long as your sending invitations out at the 3-month mark, that should be more than enough time for people to take off. If you're having a DW, then I would do them since people will need to make travel arrangements. Or you could always just send them to some people that you know might have a hard time getting off work.

We are also doing them because we are doing a Caribbean destination wedding so it's sort of a requirement to help our guest prepare for the trip. Plus we want to show off our engagement photos from our shoot in a few weeks

Thanks everybody, I think we wont be doing them. I do have some out of town guest but most of them already know and have already made arrangements. So I guess I wont need them.

I think word of mouth is fine too. I think they are nice...but in the end the people that really care will write it down on the calender when you tell them over the phone. They might be more willing actually then opening the mail and just setting it aside. Save the money