Save The Date or Save Your Money?

The prospect of having a wedding is a very exciting thing! Getting caught up in the spirit of The Day, we bought some stationery, printed up “save the date” cards, and mailed them to everyone on our guest list in August, six months before the wedding. This first expense, the cards and postage, came to just under $100 and, I’ll be honest, it’s money we could’ve saved.

Save the date cards are a relative newcomer to wedding planning and were originally intended to be a courtesy notice for out of town guests so that they could clear their schedules and make travel arrangements well in advance. They’re also nice for those guests who are busy working types and must schedule everything…you know who they are. Save the date cards are an optional courtesy. There is no rule of etiquette that requires a bride to send them to her guests.

In retrospect, we should have been more selective when sending save the dates. There was no need to send them to everyone on our guest list because most of our guests were people we saw at least once a week. It would’ve been easy enough to inform prospective guests of the date by telling them face to face. If we’d done this, I think we could’ve gotten by with sending out a mere 25 cards instead of 136. I won’t make excuses, though. We were swept away by the pleasure of wedding planning and wanted everyone to know what we were up to! In the end it was an unnecessary expense.

My daughter used the Windows Paint application to create this design and we printed the cards at home.

Having said all that, if a bride wants to send save the date cards, she can save money by making them herself. Keep the cards simple or they might be confused with an actual invitation. The only information that’s necessary is who, when, and where. A response is not required. The information might look something like this:

Please save the date
for the marriage of
Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor d’Aquitaine
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Happy Valley, State of Bliss

Invitation to follow

I’ve received save the dates in the form of small note cards and postcards. Even a handwritten note is acceptable. The goal is simply to provide advance notice of The Day. Don’t spend too much money on this. You’ll want to spend it on the invitations. :)