Friends or family members that aren’t accepting of the future spouse or their lifestyle.This will take both people in the relationship to identify deal breakers and ensure everyone gets to have a happy, drama-free day. This is also a good time to make a list of who absolutely cannot be invited. People on the C list are the first to go when it’s time to make cutbacks. C-listers are distant cousins, your mom’s sewing circle ladies whom you’ve never met and the neighbor who brings you pie every week even though you’ve never actually hung out. These are people you really like and will be next up if you have the budget and physical space to expand your invites. This likely includes immediate family, best friends and a handful of other integral people. Sit down with your partner and decide who is essential.

It’s just a fact of life that you can live without seeing some friends and family on your big day, while you can’t imagine not inviting others. Rating people is usually considered to be pretty rude, but not when it comes to wedding planning. If you want a more expensive dress, you may have to invite fewer people or consider cheaper food. That doesn’t leave a lot for venue, entertainment, dress, printed wedding invitations, transportation, photography and so on. A 150-person guest list at $70 per head means your food bill alone will be $10,500. Americans spend an average of just over $33,000 on their weddings, with about $70 per person going to catering. What are your priorities? There are a lot of ways to allocate your wedding funds.Knowing how much you have to spend will influence how many people you ultimately invite. What’s your budget? You can’t realistically host 500 people on a $2,000 budget.What can your venue hold? You’ll need to either pick a venue first and use its capacity to determine the size of your crowd or accept that making your guest list first could limit your venue options.Both are valid but require very different guest lists. What’s your vision? Some couples want glitz and glam with as many people as possible witnessing the grandeur.Save yourself the stress (and, let’s be honest, the potential arguments) and put a cap in place before you write down a single name. Whittling down a list of 400 people to 200 is painful. If you want to get yourself in a colossal mess, start building your guest list before you know how many people you can accommodate.

Wedding guest list planner