When to send invites in 2 waves

You send invites about 8 weeks before wedding. I would not try to sneak and B list people cause they could find out easily and it be bad.

Im going to be doing the same thing. I will send out invites 12 weeks before the wedding, with an rsvp deadline of 8 weeks before the wedding. Then when i have a headcount, we will move on to B list.
I am printing simple business cards from vista print to notify people to rsvp online. I will print some with a later rsvp date for my b list people. That way i dont need to sets of invites.
Im not worried about people finding out. I didnt send save the dates to b listers and im not telling them they are invited. So far no one has asked, if they do, i will be honest and say it depends on the space we have. Hope this helps

View Quoted Comment This is exactly what I’m doing, and I think it’s a great plan!

View Quoted Comment Well thank you! Can't take credit for it though. I read this on here somewhere months ago lol.

I would just expect to have to follow up with a lot of your first wave people. I’ve never had to rsvp to a wedding more than 3-4 weeks ahead of it, and honestly with the way time off works for FH and I and having to get a sitter for my daughter, we can’t really determine our ability to attend an event more than 4-5 weeks out.

We plan to send our VIPs out 3 months before the wedding and the rest out 2 months before. We are setting the VIP rsvp date to be before we send out the others so that we have a better idea. And we want all of the other rsvps back 4 weeks before the wedding so we can give the vendors a final count.

I get that hypothetically this sounds like a reasonable plan. I'd just issue a warning that it is highly likely you might have issues with the RSVPs for the first wave of invites if you're asking people to respond super early. Daughter's entire wedding was super organized, and the RSVP process was the worst part (and they just did the traditional "send all the invites at the same time" approach, no B-listing). Just because you WANT people to respond at a particular time does not mean they will and/or won't later change their minds -- especially if your RSVP date is super early. Lots of people just don't know their plans that far in advance. For all the reasons others mention, this is not something I would do, but if you're going to do it anyway, be realistic about the challenges you're might have.

I’m sending the first wave 10 weeks before hand, and then I’m sending the second wave 8 weeks (pending on the feedback from the first wave).

All of my RSVP will have the same date (to get a better rate on the invites). We have a lot of out of state guests on the first wave - and while we hope that they can make it, we know that many won’t.

So we were inviting about 130 people to begin with. Our wedding is in June. We sent the first 20ish in February JUST to family and bridal party. We were planning on waiting, but we had relatives who kept asking where the invitation was and saying they were waiting to book their travel arrangements until they had the invitation, so we just sent to those VIPs first for that reason alone (it wasn’t like an A list/B list because we were 100% inciting the rest of the list, just waiting until it got closer).

We sent the rest of them in March (12 weeks in advance) which is probably the very earliest you should ever send them. Standard is 6-8 weeks but you can go up to 12.

In early April (about 7 weeks in advance) we realized we were getting significantly more declines than we had expected... honestly I was expecting 10 maybe 20 declines, and by April we already had 30. If we got more than 10 more (which was still possible because still plenty of people were yet to RSVP) we wouldn’t have hit our venue minimum of 90. In general I (and everyone else on this site lol) would say don’t cut it close to your minimum, make sure you invite well above that number, but we couldn’t afford to have more than 130, and that’s pretty far from 90!

Anyway at that point when we were worried we wouldn’t hit the minimum, we sent out another 15 invitations (THE HORROR) but they were people who we’d love to have there but would not have been offended at all to know they weren’t on our original list... some of my mom’s friends, one of FH’s dad’s friends, an old friend of mine from preschool who I was close with a lot of my life but we lost touch a few years ago, one of our neighbors that we’ve known for my whole life but don’t talk to much anymore, etc. Our original RSVP date was May 2 but we changed it to May 12 for these people, and we sent their invitations out 6 weeks in advance, so it’s likely they won’t even know they were “B listed.”

I really didn’t want to have a B list but I wanted even less to pay my venue for 90 people and only have 85 people actually there lol. Since a B list isn’t exactly the most polite thing to do to begin with, I think the only way to go about it is to (1) not send ANYONE an invitation less than 6 weeks before the wedding, and give them at least 3 weeks before their RSVP is due (2) make sure they’re people who—if they found out—wouldn’t be offended to have known they were on the B list.

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I am agreeing with the Future Mrs. Danger,

we will make out invitation on May 25th and wait by July 1 then move on to our B list. Some on our B list know that both myself and hubby 2 b are both from large families my hubby to be is one of 9 children and six of his brothers & sisters are married.

We didn't do save the dates so we sent out our invites the first week of April with a request for them back at the end of May. We are getting married in late July. We did this because a) summer is busy with weddings, and b) we had a super long guest list. What we did was as soon as we received a decline, we sent out another invite so we have been able to invite several more people that we really wanted but couldn't have. Now that we are into May, I will most likely just skip the RSVP card. I also made sure to put on there "if you need more time to decide, no worries! Just let us know". We did this because we wanted to give people who just won't know the option of waiting but us still getting a "head count"