The Guest List: Estimate vs. Actual

This post could have also been entitled, “And Now I Will Prove How Big of a Nerd I Actually Am.”

When we first started this wedding planning adventure, I was adamant that Mr. S and I would pay for everything ourselves. Aside from not wanting to burden our parents, I knew that whoever held the purse strings had the final say when it came to making decisions and I selfishly wanted to wield all the wedding power myself—especially when it came to the guest list. The vision for our wedding has always been an intimate affair, a seemingly impossible feat considering the size of my extended family alone. I knew that my mom and dad weren’t deliberately trying to sabotage our wedding vision, but I wanted to reserve the right to veto inviting my parents’ long lost friends who we haven’t seen since I was six years old, or my mom’s third cousin who I’ve only met once 15 years ago, or any other people on the fringes of my life that my parents might feel obligated to invite. Our golden rule when it came to putting together my family’s side of the guest list was, “Have they met Mr. S?”

Mom: What if they ask me why they’re not invited?? What am I supposed to tell them??

Me: Blame us. Tell them that Mr. S and I are paying for the wedding ourselves and the guest list was entirely up us.

Mom: Oh, OK.

This arrangement didn’t cause too many headaches. My mom and I compared notes on who should be invited vs. who should not and were largely in sync. She had to make a compelling case for a few distant family members, but we eventually ended up with a list that we were all happy with (and that fit into a budget that Mr. S and I could afford on our own*). So what did our invited guest list breakdown look like?

We separated my family two groups—my cousins and my aunts/uncles—to get a good idea of the age demographic of our guest list as well.

We invited 212 guests and based on the numerous articles I had researched on wedding guest acceptance rates, our target of 150-160 guests was not so far-fetched. It sucks how wedding planning reduces our friends and loved ones to faceless dollar amounts, but that is our cruel reality. Needless to say, I was eager to know of our guest list, how many people would actually show up? I’m overly confident that I’d medal in the Excel Olympics if there was such a thing, and it was no time at all before I was slicing and dicing the numbers and probabilities of our guest list to estimate our final headcount. It made my head spin at times, but mostly, this is the kind of analysis paralysis I live for. **NERD ALERT** Here are the formulas I used to estimate our actual attendees:

The 80% Rule. The quick and dirty approach was to apply the ever-popular 80% acceptance rate. This put us at 169.6 guests attending the wedding. I immediately converted those extra 9.6 guests into dollar terms. Yikes.

The 80/65/25% Rule. A more refined methodology I found was to base the probabilities on guests’ locations: in state guests were 80%, out of state guests were 65%, and international guests were 25%. I took some liberties here: (1) I considered New York and New Jersey in-state guests and (2) yes, I know Canada is not part of the United States, but for our purposes I felt we would get a better estimate if I grouped it into the 65% bucket (no offense to you Canadians out there!). This method yielded an estimate of 146.3 acceptances.

The 90/10% Rule. The final method I employed was to assess each guest individually and assign them to a “Probably attending” or “Probably not attending” category based on how difficult it would be for them to travel so close to the holidays, what I had heard through the grapevine, and other qualitative factors. I gave the “Probably attendings” a 90% acceptance rate and the “Probably nots” a 10% acceptance rate, which resulted in an estimated 156.4 guests attending the wedding.

And just when I thought I might be done with all this ridiculousness, I had the genius idea to take the average of all three outcomes—which amounted to 157.3 guests. (Nerds love data points!)

By this point, I had spent far too much time trying to control the uncontrollable. There was nothing more I could do but be patient (ugh) and wait for the RSVPs to come rolling in. Thankfully, you don’t have to wait the six weeks that I did to know the final results.

The final tally—a round 150.0 guests (thankfully, we don’t have to deal with pesky partial guests!) and an overall acceptance rate of 71%. The distribution of who’s coming closely matches the distribution of who we invited (my side of the family dominates both pies). What I found most interesting though was which technique was most accurate. The 80% rule grossly over-estimated our actual acceptances (alleluia!)—its downfall being that we invited 29 guests from the Philippines, most of which were courtesy invitations (we knew most of them couldn’t make the trip overseas).

The 80/65/25% rule was much more accurate, under by only four guests. Even more fascinating to me was how close our actual percentages were to the estimated probabilities—in-state guests 84% (up 4% from estimate), out of state guests 62% (down 3% from estimate), and international guests 23% (down 2% from estimate). (Can you tell I work in financial reporting?)

Not surprisingly, the 90/10% rule was more accurate than the 80% rule as well. Evaluating each guest individually certainly makes for a more precise calculation, and our actual number was lower by six guests compared to this method’s estimate.

For what it’s worth, I’d recommend the 80/65/25% rule to anyone who’s also trying to predict the future. Not only was it the most accurate, but it also required less effort than the 90/10% rule (assuming you are already collecting guests’ locations for invitation purposes). Even though I like spreadsheets and working with numbers, I’ll take any opportunity I can to be lazy.

What were your guest acceptance rates? Did you use a different method to estimate how many guests would RSVP “Yes” to your wedding?

* It seemed too good to be true that our original venue, reBar, gave us an all-inclusive package that fit into a budget that Mr. S and I could pay for ourselves—and it was. Seven months after we paid $22,000 upfront to reBar, they shut down. We got our upfront payment back through insurance, but it certainly was not enough to replace everything that we had lost—no other venue could match reBar’s deal. When we got engaged, my parents gifted us a generous amount of money to do with as we pleased. Back then, we decided to put it toward a nest egg for a down payment on a future home rather than spend it on the wedding. Once reBar blew up, we had to recreate a realistic, bigger wedding budget—the difference being made up by my parents’ gift. It was disheartening at first that we had to pull funds from this savings account, but mostly I’m just grateful that we have a wonderful support system (my parents are effectively helping us pay for this wedding) and we’ll still be able to have the wedding we envisioned.

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Miss Squid


Birthday: November 06 Location: NYC / Brooklyn Occupation: Assistant Controller Wedding Date: December 2014 Venue: St. Charles Borromeo / The Liberty Warehouse

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