- 1). Decide how many guests you want to invite. Calculate how many guests you can afford to have if your budget is limited. Your catering vendor can give you an estimate of how much it will cost to serve food and drinks to each guest. Divide the per-guest cost into your overall food and drink budget. The resulting number is the number of guests you can afford to invite.
- 2). Write down a list of all the essential people who are coming to the wedding. Include yourselves, your immediate family members and the members of your bridal party. Subtract this number from the overall number of guests you calculated in Step 1.
- 3). Divide up the remaining number of guests between your families. Choose half the guests yourselves, let the bride's parents choose one quarter and let the groom's parents choose one quarter. If you are planning to invite 100 guests other than yourselves and your bridal party, this means the two of you can create a list of 50 guests while each of your families is allowed to invite 25 people. Readjust the way you divide up the numbers if one of you is from a very small family and the other has dozens of relatives.
- 4). Ask everyone to return their finished guest lists to you in one week. Forbid anyone from trying to add to the lists after the deadline has passed.
- 5). Compile all the guest lists. Cross off any guests who appear on multiple lists.
- 6). Make cuts if any of you have exceeded your guest limit. Cross off any guests who you haven't spoken to in over a year or anyone who won't know any other guests unless it's a close friend you can't do without.
- 7). Ask single guests to come without dates. Etiquette states that you must invite spouses or live-in partners of your guests, but leave out the "and guest" on the address line of invitations for your single guests.
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