Guest list (long list) protocols when people likely won't show?

Hey all,My fiance and I are building our guest list for budget and save the date purposes for September 2022. We were actually fairly pleased with the way it seemed to break down when we drew it out-- I have about 50 people in my family out to the great aunt/uncle and second cousin level (that's the degree of family I regularly hang out with), and my fiance, who comes from a larger extended family, has about 50 people in his family out to the aunt/uncle and first cousin level (which is the degree of family he regularly hangs out with). That leaves about 50 spaces for our friends and our parents', anticipating that some people won't come and we'll have somewhere south of 150 but north of 100 guests (which is perfect for our current venue, a country club).So we emailed this tentative list to my fiance's mom last night, and got on the phone with her to discuss who we may have missed, and which friends of hers she would like to invite. She's South Asian, a culture where typically everyone you know is invited to the wedding and it can be easily 500 people, so I was prepping myself to gently tell her our venue had a certain capacity, and we were aiming for 150 invites only.But to my surprise, as we went down the list, she started shooting everyone down. "They won't come, they're too far away," or "They won't come, they don't have enough money," or "They won't come, I already talked to them and they're not interested," or "They won't come, they're busy." (Busy on a weekend a year from now? Apparently so.)I looked at my fiance as this continued and mouthed that I thought something was up. This is our second stab at conceiving our wedding (we were going to do a small elopement-type ceremony and large reception), and I do NOT want this to get fucked up again. I had him get off speakerphone and ask her if she was ACTUALLY okay with this plan (non-religious ceremony, blended reception, lots of South Asian cultural traditions throughout). I don't need my fiance's mom upset about the way we want the wedding to be and trying to sabotage. If there's an issue, I need to know NOW.So he asked, and then called his brother to corroborate what she had said. As far as he can tell, it's legit. She IS excited and happy about the wedding-- so much so that she talked to a bunch of people about it already (which I wouldn't have advised her to do, but oh well). They all gave her these weird cold-ish responses, which apparently bummed her out. She was telling us because she didn't want my fiance to get his hopes up that his whole family would be there, or even a lot of them.I get that not everyone can come. Weddings are expensive, plane tickets are expensive, hotels are expensive. And I get that in COVID times, sometimes a LOT of people don't want to commit to doing things, so I was expecting maybe even a larger attrition rate than usual. But to think that half the groom's family won't show? It seems strange to me, but even more than strange, it makes me think that the number we currently have for save the date purposes will not be helpful for budgeting purposes. And I don't want to have to realize in ten months when people are RSVP'ing "no" in droves that I could have spent that money on other things.Does anybody have any advice on this? I told my fiance to do a call-through of his list to get a soft head count, and then run some of those conversations by his mom. If people say they don't want to come, we'll leave them off. If they say they intend to come, we'll take them at their word, and put them on the list. But is this the best approach, or is there another way to handle this? via /r/weddingplanning https://ift.tt/3juuRV5