Help! My Guest List is Too Long!

Is this something you find yourself saying when taking a look at the prices for the reception vs the people you want to invite to take part in your ceremony and reception?  This is a situation that I found myself in this past week as we worked to finalize the guest list (and make sure that we invited the people my parents knew needed to be invited as well).  While creating our guest list, we started with making a list of everyone we wanted to have at our wedding.  This list was huge!  We knew our limit was around 150 people, but this paper list ended up being around 200.  This was even before my parents' list was brought in.  Adding my parents' list brought the number to about 250, and we needed to start making some decisions.  We started with a high lighter, and went through and high lighted the names of family, very close friends, and people who had some part in the wedding day (my friends doing hair, my hairpiece, photographer, wedding party, officiant, etc).  With the absolute essential people taken care of, we moved onto the people who we would like to see come but may not since they're coming in from out of state.  This ended up being around 30 people; we will send them invites, but we're assuming they're not going to make it out (they are counted in our current count right now, so it won't be a big deal if they actually do come).  The final group of people that we colored were the people who would probably be there (those ones who weren't coming from out of state) for the whole night.  This left around 40 people who weren't high lighted, but we had a plan for a few of these.  After some discussion with my event planner at the hotel, I found out that I could have any number of people at the dance, after the dinner has been cleared.  While there are some wedding sites (The Knot being one of them) that say this is tacky, I don't think it actually matters that much.  It's a great way to save money, and if your wedding is at a time of day where some people might still be working (since we're having ours mid-afternoon on a Friday, this could very well be an issue for some people), it assures them that you still want them to be a part of your big day if you invite them to the party after the fact.  I'm also lucking out in this area because we will be having a hosted bar for an hour after the dinner service, so my guests won't miss out on too much (there will also be some extra cake, so they can probably get some of that, too!).