Which came first: setting your budget or your guest list?

They both happened somewhat happened simultaneously along with our date and venue.

x small number of guests = fancy wedding at x venue on x date

but I would hate to cut this group of friends/family so change that to y number of guests which would cost $y to host this way at this venue and would tax y long to save for it or we could lower food/venue/etc. cost to be able to afford by z date.

It went around and around like that for awhile until we found our comfortable compromise.

Guest list!

Budget first.

Haven't done either yet, but i'm guessing the budget will be first to make it easier to know who to and who not to invite

Budget was first for sure since it helped us make a guest list

They both came around the same time. I already had an idea of the guest count before we were even engaged! Helped us decide what a reasonable budget would be for the number of people

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No way! Are your out-of-towners mostly friends or family!?

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That's so funny! How many guests do you two currently have on your list!?

View Quoted Comment We are inviting a little over 200 with the hopes of it going down to about 150-160. Hopefully haha

View Quoted Comment Both! All on my side though, FH’s family is all nearby and he went to school in-state so everyone is local for him. For me... my dad is British so half of my family is overseas, I went to undergrad and grad school in two different states, and I worked as a traveling consultant making friends all over the country! I’m guessing we’ll have a minimum of 10% no’s, maybe as high as 25-30% because just so many people will need to travel! And it’s on a Sunday!

Budget. We're still working on the guest list (mostly now it's just taking people we don't talk to anymore off the guest list)!

We did guest list first. We knew that we wanted family and close friends at our wedding. It also help to give us and idea of what we wanted for a budget.

We still haven't really decided a budget. Basically if it doesn't cost too much, we will get it. But we tackled the guest list first since that was easy.

The budget! Although the budget did change quite significantly once we did some research and realised our expectations were unrealistic. We were hoping our budget would cover the wedding plus a honeymoon... but it's all gone to the wedding, along with an extra 25% on top of that. All up, we're spending about double what we initially expected - partly because our expectations were unrealistic, partly because we're doing more of a to-do than we originally planned, and and partly because of the many unexpected expenses that have cropped up.

We both knew we didn't want a giant wedding, so once we had a budget, we made a guestlist, and ranked people by how likely we thought they were to come. We estimated we'd have between 40-50 guests including ourselves... and boom! We ended up with 45 on the nose. Nailed it.

Guest list. We knew from the beginning we wanted something fairly small. After we secured the venue and knew about the 60 guest capacity, we honed the list.

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What type of venue did you two end up booking!?

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A couple of buildings at our local county museum. They have a pioneer village set up.

Our budget. Then we came into some more money and expanded the guest list.

We dont really have a budget which is super bad. We are trying to shop around and be reasonable but we dont have a set price. The guest list is much bigger than we wanted !!!! 228 people and thats cutting some people 🙈

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Oh wow!! How many guest did you two have to cut?!