Making the most of your special event is obviously very important. You want to have the perfect venue with the best music with all your friends, but this can be tricky. If you are like the average American, you will have a budget to stick too. This means you can’t invite everyone and their twice removed cousins to your event and expect to pay a reasonable bill.

When hosting an event it’s important to think about your guest list, my suggestion to you, is to keep the guest list manageable. Think about it this way…if you invite 100 people to you birthday celebration, then you can expect almost all of them will have a plus one. This bumps your guest list expectancy to around 200. That’s 200 mouths to feed and 200 people to make small talk with. To me, that sounds horrifying. When celebrating an event I like to mingle with my closest friends and actually enjoy myself. If you are carrying on conversations with every guest, you’re most likely to be overwhelmed and want the event to end before it really begins.

Think smart…if you haven’t talked to Joe since high school graduation, then it’s probably safe to say you can cut him from the list, but it’s not always going to be that simple. What about the coworkers from work? Well, that all depends on your preference, if you don’t like to mix business with pleasure then scratch coworkers off the list. If you don’t mind, then I would suggest making sure you are close enough to ensure that it wouldn’t be awkward going into the office on Monday, if you happen to have a little too much to drink and decide it’s a good idea to dance on the tables.

On any budget, you need to realize that you can’t invite everyone. Keep the guest list to your close friends and family. This not only helps to keep the budget down, which is always a good idea, but also lessens the amount of accommodations you will have to make. Inviting everyone you can think of just leads to headaches you don’t need or want that will in the end ruin your event. Parties are all about fun and excitement so don’t stress about Joe from high school, have fun with every aspect of the event planning process and know that it will all eventually fall into place.

Recap on the reason’s to keep the guest list small:

-Saves money

-You won’t have to accommodate so many needs

-You won’t be forced to make small talk with 100s of people

-Less stress=More fun

Samantha A. Perryman

Marketing and Social Media Intern | Birthdaysandbottles.com