Decorating your home can be a daunting task. What color do you want in your living room and does it match the color scheme you have in your bedroom and kitchen? Simply trying to figure out what style of furniture you want (or agreeing with your roommate or spouse) can bring on a migraine. In addition to aesthetics, the cost of decorating (or redecorating) your home can be a real deterrent.

Having a plan and a budget and sticking to it are essential to decorating your home. If you know exactly how you want your house to look before you do anything, you can get the look you want without breaking your bank account.

But how do you effectively plan and budget? Well, that smartphone in your pocket is a great place to start. There are countless apps out there right now that allow you to visualize your decorating project before you get rid of one piece of furniture or paint one wall in that new color.

Here are six smartphone apps that will help you visualize your decorating, and in turn help you save money, all the while getting that look you’ve been dreaming about.

Palettes by Rick Maddy. This is a great (and free!) app for creating a matching color palette throughout your house. You can snap a photo of anything that catches your fancy, upload it, and the program will create color matches based on the colors in the photo. See a beautiful vase or a painting that catches your eye? Snap a picture of it, load it into Palettes, and open up all the color opportunities.

Photo Measures. You’ve got a plan for your new living room, and you’ve got pages and pages of detailed drawings, indicating all the measurements of your furniture and your room, but when you get to the furniture store, you realize you’ve forgotten all those intricate drawings you’ve spent hours on. Photo Measures solves that problem by allowing you to take pictures of your furniture or living room and write the measurements right on the picture. Now you have all the measurements you need in one place. The app costs $5.99.

Home Design DIY Interior Room Layout Space Planning & Decorating Tool. Along with Photo Measures, this app is essential when you’re planning out your new living room, master bedroom, etc. You can input measurements, make floor plans, and get as specific as you want by adding information on your colors and fabrics. By knowing exactly where everything goes, you can save time and money running back and forth to stores, hoping that the couch you just bought will fit and look right. Again, it goes back to proper planning. At $1.99 this app is a steal for what it offers.

Yard Sale Treasure Map. Yard Sales are a great place to find inexpensive hidden treasures. It’s a numbers game however; you might have to hit up multiple yard sales before you find that great end table or lamp that will fit perfectly in your home. Instead of relying on tiny Yard Sale signs in your neighborhood telling you when and where a yard sale is, the Yard Sale Mapper app (it’s free!) allows you to find all the yard sales happening on a given day within 20 miles of your location. You can save time and oodles of money.

SnapShop. You’ve got some ideas, but have no way of knowing if that new couch would work with the new wallpaper you just put up. With SnapShop, you can digitally add furniture from just about any retailer’s catalog and see how it looks in your home. SnapShop is a great free app that will help you visualize how your home can look, which reduces the amount of guesswork that can go into home decoration. Reducing the guesswork reduces the headaches and the strain on your budget.

Houzz Interior Design Ideas. For those of you that want to decorate but are lacking in ideas, this free app can be a godsend. You can browse thousands of high quality design images and save those pictures to virtual idea books, kind of like Pinterest.

These are just several of the apps out there to help make home decorating as easy and fulfilling as possible. With these apps, planning becomes easier, and when planning becomes easier, you save money.

Are there any other apps out there that you like to use for home decorating?

Chris Long is a Home Depot store associate in the Chicago area, where he has been helping customers since 2000. Chris is also a contributor to Home Depot’s decor and furniture website Home Decorators.com. His interests range from providing advice on living room furniture and bathroom cabinets to bookcases and room dividers.