Everything You Need to Know Before Purchasing Wedding Invitations

Who Pays?

Invitations and all other wedding stationery typically fall under the responsibility of the bride and her family. And that includes all the enclosures, announcements, programs, and thank-you notes. In fact, if you follow traditional convention, your wedding costs should be covered almost entirely by the bride's family. However this custom most likely stems from a time when a bride came with a dowry, and the size of her dowry often determined how well she married. Obviously, times have changed. And most couples these days are financially independent and choose to pay for much of their wedding costs themselves. In most cases, parents also play a large role and even offer to help with the financial burden of hosting a wedding.

If both sets of parents plan to cover some of the costs, it becomes yet another important step to figure out who's paying for what. There are several different ways of doing this. You could simply determine a budget and then split the entire cost in half. Each set of parents pays for their half in a single sum, and the bride and groom can decide how to allocate the money as they go ahead and plan the event. Another way to do it is to have each family pay for their invited guests. Since the budget eventually gets broken down into cost per head, this should be an easy and fair solution. It is also helpful if more than half the guests are coming from one side, or if the families have differing opinions on how much to spend on the wedding. Yet another method for divvying up the bill is to sit down together and assign expenses to each party. This method is preferred if the parents have particular interests in the planning process. For example, the bride's mother could feel very strongly about having formal invitations for the wedding with every enclosure possible, in which case that could be an expense assigned to the bride's side. And the groom could have his heart on holding the reception at the same country club where his parents were married. Then the responsibility of paying for the location would belong to his family. Of course this could potentially raise some issues. For instance, if the two sides can't agree on certain issues, things could get awkward for everyone involved. To avoid a parental face-off, it is a good idea for the bride and groom to assign the responsibilities for each side first before sitting down with the parents.

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