There are so many options out there, where do you start!? How much do wedding invitations typically cost? How far in advance from your wedding date should you send them? Should you do an RSVP card and return envelope? Well, because we have our wedding coming up, I just went through this process and here is what we did.
I have always dreamed of gorgeous letterpress invitations on thick luxurious paper. However, our budget had different ideas. So, I spent a lot of time perusing Etsy, Vista Print, Shutterfly, Minted and Google to find a design that fit our taste and also our budget. After price comparing and weighing all the options out there, I didn't want to spend a fortune on the invitations but I wanted them to be pretty. I chose to go with the Rustic Charm four panel invitation on Minted. They had a promotion for a free website with custom URL along with a $50 off coupon. They also do unlimited edits and their customer service was excellent. We spent $240 for 120 invitations, pre addressed envelopes, return address stickers and a sheet of 20 custom stamps. My goal was to spend $300 or less on the wedding invitations, so with postage we came to about $275 total.
The rule of thumb for sending out invitations is 6-8 weeks prior to the day of your event. Because we have so many people coming to our wedding from out of state, we wanted to get the invitations out ASAP (the save the dates went out almost a year prior to our event). So, we our sending out our invitations almost 8 months prior, this way it gives people plenty of time to plan and budget and get their butts to our wedding weekend!
I opted to not do an RSVP card, although, I really wanted to pick out a pretty little card and pre postage envelopes, once again our budget had other ideas. Instead, we did our RSVP on our wedding website instead. This was a great way to cut the cost of the invitations and extra postage for the return envelopes. I considered doing an RSVP postcard instead because the postage is less than a regular envelope, however, doing it on the website was free! So that's what we did.
I hope these tips helped you out on your wedding invitation process! Happy wedding planning!