I'm planning DH's 40th for later this year (summer). We have a preferred venue (meaningful to us) and it's not hideously expensive to hire, but add catering in and suddenly my budget is blown! I earn a lot less than DH and would really like to cover this myself especially as it's meant to be a surprise, which I can do but only if I don't pay for everyone's drinks.
Until I've worked out all my options, I'm not sure whether it will be a small sit-down dinner and then everyone else along afterwards (in style of evening wedding reception) or just a free-for-all buffet and hope I've got the amount of food roughly right. I think it would be a bit cheeky to ask people who are coming from a long way to a party that isn't catered, so I think the buffet option is the only way forward, but then the numbers increases the catering budget to the point where I can't afford to pay for one round of drinks, let alone a free bar.
I'm also quite worried about wasting money needlessly. A lot of DH's friends, especially the ones who would have to travel, are quite unreliable (getting RSVPs for our wedding was a nightmare, I left DH to it and there was still some uncertainty on the day), so I don't want to commit to a certain amount of catering and then see food going to waste when that money could have been used on drinks instead. However, would be awful to not have enough food. The variation based on unreliable friends is over 50% of the guestlist, so quite a big difference! Thing is, I don't want to say anything to people until I have a better idea of what I'm doing, but then again I need a fairly good idea of numbers to be able to budget properly!
So main question atm is, is it ok to have a paid bar? Just one drink on arrival would add about another 25% to the budget, and I can't cut that off the food bill without being in serious danger of severely under-catering. The venue is a pub, so it's not like hotel prices for drinks...