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Video Transcript

Julissa: Hey, welcome back to “Good Day Sacramento.” All right, the nerd is back. You saw him dancing just a moment ago. I would love to see your dancing that you do at weddings, though.

Ryan: Oh, I’m amazing.

Julissa: I believe it.

Ryan: I get invited every weekend. It’s unbelievable.

Julissa: It’s unbelievable. We can definitely can help people out when it comes to planning their big day. There’s a great app to share with us this morning. I love this one.

Ryan: So this one’s called WeddingHappy, and the cool part about this is it’s a cool app that you can put on your iPhone or an Android if you have to suffer through that.

Julissa: Yeah, I know.

Ryan: But essentially what you can do is put it in your wedding date, and it creates a list of everything you need to do to prepare for your wedding. It says, “Hey, you gotta research your DJ by this date, you’ve got to mail your Save-The-Date cards, you got to do research your florist.

Julissa: Oh, my goodness. That’s great.

Ryan: I say it’s like having a mother-in-law on your phone reminding you what to do.

Julissa: And it also tells you the whole budget. See? You know you put in your big budget and how much you spent for each item, also how much you’re paying per guest because that’s the part people forget about too.

Ryan: And you can share this with other people in your wedding planning so you’re not responsible for everything. And you can see when people have clicked things off and other stuff. How cool is that?

Julissa: Fantastic.

Ryan: Okay. So let’s say you’re not really familiar with an area or you just don’t know what kind of venue you want to go to, this is like Airbnb but for a wedding event, right?

Julissa: Wow. Okay.

Ryan: So you just put it where you’re gonna go or you can search by, like, I want to go, for example, I want to go to gardens or waterfronts or I want a mansion or a museum or a hotel. So I went to barns and farms, and so you can click and you can see how well it’s rated, you can see roughly how much it’s going to cost. If you click it, Some of them even have a little 3D tours so you can kind of see what’s going on, you can see what your pictures are gonna look like.

Julissa: I love looking at wedding photos.

Ryan: How cool is that?

Julissa: Yes. It’s beautiful.

Ryan: So this just gives you one-stop shopping for everything you want. It’s called weddingwire.com and you can go there and just check it out.

Julissa: And you can message them directly from here too.

Ryan: Yeah.

Julissa: Okay.

Ryan: And see if the dates are available. Now, nobody likes bridesmaid dresses.

Julissa: Nope.

Ryan: Nobody does.

Julissa: Nobody does.

Ryan: Quit making people buy them. It’s ridiculous. So this is called renttherunway.com, and now they have other things besides wedding dresses. Look at these. So you can just rent these.

Julissa: Oh, look at that.

Ryan: Instead of having to spend 300 bucks you can rent this for $40 or $55.

Julissa: Because that’s the hard part, is that your friends ask you to be in this, but it’s a huge expense. This would definitely help out. Oh, my gosh, love this.

Ryan: I know, I saw this. And you click it and you go, “Oh, okay. I want that in my wedding.” It’s sparkly, right?

Julissa: And you can change…you can rent it for a few days. Oh, look at that. Beautiful.

Ryan: And you see pictures from users who actually put it on and real-world bodies, so you’re not looking at like, you know, models and they’re super skin.

Julissa: Right, right.

Ryan: How cool is that? renttherunway.com.

Julissa: Uh-huh, Rent the Runway.

Ryan: So last but not least, this is called Zola. Zola allows you to do a registry. Now normally if you’re gonna do registry you’re going to Target with your little gun and you zap everything. But what if you don’t find everything you want at Target, right? So this allows you to put all your wedding registry in one spot, people can go there and buy whatever they want, and here’s the cool part, is it doesn’t always have to be just gifts, right? You can put honeymoon stuff on there. If you’re going to do a down payment on a house, people can share, they can go in and buy.

Julissa: Because a lot of times people get married later in life, they already have the house or they just do not…they don’t need the stuff. So all great.

Ryan: There’s also an app so you can put it on your phone, and the cool part is you’ll get alerts when somebody buys or does something like that so you can go, “Oh, cool.”

Julissa: Got that, got that. Ryan, these are all so fantastic. We’re gonna link up all of this to our website as well if you are in the middle of maybe planning your big day, and these could definitely help you out. We’ve got those linked up for you. Ryan, thank you so much.

Ryan: You’re welcome.

Julissa: Back over to you.

Woman: Good stuff.

Man: It’s a car…

Weddings are a kind of odd cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, they’re meant to be romantic — and to be fair, more often than not they actually, genuinely are. On the other hand, they’re work. None of that gooey romance stuff happens unless you work really hard to get those logistics details, bridesmaid’s “disagreements” and financial considerations properly squared away.

Wedding photo

Case in point: This “spontaneous” picture required six months of planning and the services of a professional leaf-arranger.

If you’re planning on getting hitched in the near future, chances are at some point you’ll feel like you’re drowning in a sea of stuff to organize, resolve or generally keep track of.

If you’re willing to dabble in a bit of nerdistry though, the whole process can be much easier. That’s right, you guessed it! There are a bunch of free apps and tools you can use to nerdify your nuptials and generally make sure everything runs like clockwork.

Let’s take a look at a few of the latest and greatest wedding apps.

Stay On Schedule

Wedding Happy is a free app which is designed to greatly simplify the process of managing your wedding schedule — and we’re not just talking about the “big” dates here. It’s designed to help you see the entire wedding timeline, including those smaller tasks which are so easy to forget.

Wedding Schedulers

A team of expert wedding timeologists hard at work designing a wedding timeline (before Wedding Happy put them out of a job.)

The real beauty of this particular app is that it doesn’t lumber you with the stress of designing your wedding timeline from a blank calendar situation. Instead, you enter your wedding date and Wedding Happy gets to work backward populating a complete, suggested timeline which (of course) you can then tweak and refine.

It’s such a simple difference but it makes the world of difference from a stress standpoint. There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank screen trying to figure out where to begin. Wedding Happy takes that pain point away and gives you something to work with! Clever, guys. Very clever!

Beyond helping you with your timeline, Wedding Happy can help you track payments, give you a spending summary and equip you with some handy vendor management tools.

Pro-tip: Take advantage of Wedding Happy’s feature and share your timeline with your helpers! That way you’re not doing all of it yourself. Many hands make light work, and all that.

Pick Your Venue and Vendors

If time management is one of your biggest wedding stresses, finding the right vendors has to be up there in the top five. The wedding industry is a behemoth, and there are more photographers, caterers, event organizers, DJs and other assorted nuptialologists (not a real term) than you can shake a bouquet at. It’s genuinely overwhelming.

Wedding Wire (free to use) tackles this problem head on, and then builds a comprehensive wedding wrangling strategy on top of that.

Let’s say you’re looking for a hairdresser and a photographer. Using Wedding Wire you can plunder a list of over 250,000 local wedding professionals, shortlisting candidates using criteria such as price, availability, and even user reviews. It’s basically Google, Yelp and a wedding directory all bundled into one intuitive app on your smartphone.

Once you’ve got your vendors nailed down, from within the same app you can build checklists, your guest list, a registry. You can even find and reserve venues, taking advantage of the apps 360-degree virtual venue tours.

Oh, and fancy some icing on top of this cake of niftiness? Use Wedding Wire’s built-in wedding website wizard to design your own custom wedding webpage.

Bridesmaid Dresses with Less Grumbling

Sigh. Then we get to the really tricksy elephant in the wedding room. You knew it was going to come up sooner or later, right? 

On the one hand, you’re asking a cohort of completely innocent and well-meaning women to spend a lot of money on something they may wear literally once. On the other hand, you’re also saying, “Hey I want you to wear this peach ’n lime colored thing with frills on it because it matches my bouquet and the ornate table decorations I bought last week. Live with it.”

Bride and bridesmaids

Bridesmaids secretly plotting revenge for being forced to buy a dress they’ll wear once.

It’s doomed to be a tricky negotiation at the best of times … or … is it?

Rent the Runway is a free app which allows you to rent clothes. They have hundreds of styles, many of them adjustable for most body sizes and shapes. If you’re worried a particular dress won’t fit, no problem! Just grab a backup size free.

What about jewelry and accessories I hear fashion conscious nerdettes inquire? No problem. It’s all available in the app. This neat concept offers a good chance you can at least take some of the sting out of the whole bridesmaid dress conundrum.

Create a Universal Registry

No one wants, needs or should own seven toasters. Two might be useful with guests over — three if one of them is a complete toast hound. But seven? 

Wedding gift table

Believe it or not but hidden in this gift table are 3 of the exact same toasters.

The sad fact is if you want to avoid having too many of one thing, a well-curated wedding registry is pretty much mandatory.

Zola is a free app designed to help you up your registry game by creating a registry which applies across any number of stores. No messy duplicate registries. No complicated and annoying instructions for your guests on how they can access a handful of your registries across different stores.

Zola is a one-stop-shop for registries, allowing you to add gifts from multiple vendors, along with setting up gift card options, honeymoon funds, and group gifting, to cover those big, expensive gifts.

The app even offers access to a registry advisor, who can give you free advice on creating a registry which is fun, useful and which doesn’t come across as being too “grabby.”

Handle the Money

We started this list with the stress of managing time. Let’s end this article with scheduling’s equal and opposite harbinger of stress headaches: Money.

Honeyfi is a neat little free app designed to help couples manage their finances to achieve their financial goals. Using Honeyfi, the couple-to-be can set a wedding savings goal and gradually work toward it as a team.

Bouquet of money

All weddings are literally made of money.

A particularly cool add-on here is that you can have the app automate savings contribution. It’s literally a set it and forget it situation, where you define what you want to save and Honeyfi transparently handles the transactions for you.

You can also categorize your expenses and allocate how your savings spread across these categories. In real time both of you can see how you’re doing, with the nice added benefit that it gives you some early practice in working together as a team on money decisions.

Making a wedding happen isn’t all sugar sprinkles, charmingly romantic japes and flirtatious arguments over who gets to choose what flavor of icing goes on the cake. It’s a big task. Before you venture too far, you might want to grab yourself some apps to make the whole process that much easier. Good luck! Oh and don’t let Uncle Warren drink too much at the reception! You know how he gets.

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