Each Sunday I like to sit down and map out the week in my Erin Condren Life Planner. I use the horizontal life planner and I love it. Since this week is split between two months, I thought it’d be great to share how I set up my Erin Condren Life Planner for the monthly view and the weekly view. I’ll also be showing how I budget our expenses for the month.
Pens, Stickers, and More
To decorate and set up each week in my planner, I use a few types of pens, stickers, and other accessories. I’ve been loving the PaperMate InkJoy gel pens for my Erin Condren Life Planner. They come in a variety of colors and write so well. I also really love the Sharpie fine point felt pens because they won’t bleed through the pages and are really crisp/precise.
I pretty much only use the Erin Condren sticker books — the classic collection ed. #2 is my favorite because all of the colors coordinate really well and they all have a metallic foil accent. I have really been liking the rose gold metallic accent stickers, but there are also silver and gold options in the book.
I like the Polaroid Zip printer because I can instantly print out a picture (less than a minute) and the photo paper is a sticker, so I can decorate my planner on the go. The pictures really personalize my planner and make it like a mini scrapbook.
The Erin Condren snap-in bookmarks are great. I snap one in at the beginning of each month to mark my place for our monthly budget spreadsheet. The bookmarks are so cute and I like how they’re small so it doesn’t feel like they’re adding bulk to my planner.
Monthly View
The monthly view of my Erin Condren Life Planner is a quick glance of what activities/events I have going on during the month. I’ll usually tape off a special events that run through multiple days, and write on a flag sticker for things like Pay Day or birthdays. Get $10 off your first Erin Condren purchase when you sign up for an account through my link. All my stickers are from the Erin Condren sticker book. If I had a vacation or a special birthday, I would print out a cute picture with the Polaroid Zip and add it to that day like I did when we recently went to Carmel.
A lot of times I don’t have much to put on the monthly view in the beginning of the month, so I’ll go back and update it during/at the end of the month just so I have it all documented.
On the side of my monthly view, I like to write down ideas for this blog, track expenses, or write out goals for the month.
Weekly View
I don’t like the idea of cluttering up my planner with a bunch of stickers; I like the Erin Condren colors and designs and I like having white space in my planner. For the weekly view, I set up my Erin Condren Life Planner with stickers as accents to highlight appointments or events — trash day, car service appointment, birthday dinner, etc. I usually like to stick with the same metallic color theme, but I occasionally mix and match. I like using the Erin Condren sticker book since all the colors complement each other and there are a lot of flag stickers.
I make a grocery list on Saturday since that’s when we go grocery shopping each week. I like to use one of the long, thin stickers to separate the weekdays from the weekend. Once I have all of my weekly plans written in, I’ll go through and write daily to-do’s, or use a post-it to write tasks that might not have a firm date/time.
I love that there’s a “Thankful Thought” section each week — this week, I am so thankful to finally have made the last payment on our student loan!!! As I mentioned in one of my monthly favorites, I’ve been listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast and following the baby steps to become debt free.
Monthly Budget
A huge part of our journey to paying off our debt has been developing and sticking to our monthly budget. I love having a budget because I am in control of my money. At the beginning of each month, we use a spreadsheet to designate where we want our money to go for the month. We plug in our income and then subtract out bills, food, car expenses, etc. Anything left over gets thrown at the debt so that there is no money left unaccounted for. Creating a budget helped us to identify what areas we were spending too much — eating out, random trips to target.
Each month I print out the budget and tape it into my planner and track expenses throughout the month.
RELATED > How To Make A Budget & How I Track Money With My Erin Condren Life Planner
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