When you get married it's great to share your wedding day with your friends and family, but before you casually mention your wedding to Bob from Accounts or your whole Sunday football team, it's important to think seriously about numbers.
The average UK wedding now costs in excess of £20,000 and a large proportion of that will be made up with your food and drink budget. You will need to allow approximately £50.00 per head for a day guest at your wedding. This should cover welcome drinks, food, wine, toast drinks and evening food. However, some upmarket venues may charge closer to this sum just for a three course dinner.
If you choose to invite all of your friends, everyone from work, friends from sports teams and your Parents friends you could easily reach 150 people. Before you know it that's £7500 just on food and drink alone and if your total budget is £10,000 it's not going to stretch to cover venue hire, entertainment, wedding clothing, ceremony fees, transportation, rings, accommodation and all of the other endless costs related to your wedding.
So how do you keep numbers in check? Firstly make a list of everyone you would like to invite and see what figure you reach. To have a wedding with a budget below £10000, you ideally want to keep to 50-60 day guests, with another 20 or so guests arriving for the disco.
Evening guests will only cost you the price of any evening food you arrange, normally around £10-15 per head and you can often only cater for 80% of guests for evening food as many will have eaten a big meal before they arrive.
If your list is on the larger side, you may have to be a bit ruthless to keep your budget on track. A good way to cut guests is to create some simple rules such as only inviting people that you have seen in the last year prior to getting engaged or only inviting work colleagues that you have socialised with outside of work.
Obviously family are a bit more complicated and you may need to discuss with your Parents who you need to invite. Perhaps stick to immediate family, Grandparents, Uncles and Aunts and first Cousins only. You may need to have some honest conversations with your Parents if they wish to invite twenty of their closest friends.
Another good trick is to think how you would feel if the person you are considering inviting got married and you weren't invited to their wedding. If you wouldn't be that bothered, the chances are that they won't mind not being invited to yours. What do you do if you try all of this and still have 200 people? Well you can always get married abroad and see if your Great Aunt Edna, twice removed still wants to come!
For more useful help planning your wedding, visit http://www.how2ido.co.uk/ to learn about our fun, affordable wedding planning workshops in Bristol
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