I sent out my save the dates about 10 months in advance. I think the rule of thumb is as soon as you have a date narrowed down, order them and send them out! That gives people tine to save money for the trip!
On another note, I found out that you can only have 20% of your guests NOT stay at the Hard Rock. So if you have 20 guests only 4 can stay elsewhere! I thought that sucked. I'm still going in August for a site inspection and will get an idea of the costs so I will let you know what I find out. I'm budgeting about 10k just to be safe but I want to do excursions and cocktail hours and stuff throughout the week. I really have no idea if that is a reasonable number or not! We shall see!