Easy, Affordable Faith Planner

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I am a total planner nerd. But, each of my planners has a purpose and I use them all in different ways to help me achieve the various goals I have set for myself in a particular year. Since it’s the beginning of the year, I have recently set up my 2020 Faith Planner. While I am relatively new to daily planners and Happy Planners, I am on my fourth year of using a personal-sized binder planner for faith planning.

What is a faith planner?

A faith planner is simply a planner that you use to help you along your personal faith journey. If you check Pinterest, you will find some people use a traveler’s notebook for this type of planning. I love traveler’s notebooks, as you might remember from my prior post about my holiday planner. And, I would have purchased one for this purpose if I had not discovered the Recollections Creative Year Personal Binder Planner by Michael’s craft store.

Why I love Michael’s Creative Year Binders

There are many binder-based personal planners on the market right now. One of the original versions is the Franklin Covey binder system, which is an awesome planning system. Others include Filofax (see #Ad below). What sold me on the Michael’s version is both the price and the many types of inserts you can purchase for these handy little binders. I buy my Creative Year binders in my local Michael’s store, and I find that they are either on sale, and if not, you can use the weekly 40% off coupon that they send out in the Sunday paper and to folks who have signed up for their email promotions.

A much higher-end version of a personal sized binder are the ones by Filofax, which are popular both in the U.S. and Europe.

There are so many inserts you can purchase for these binders, including Goals, Wedding, Dot grid journal, Lined Journal, etc. The ones that I have found best for my faith planner are the Inspiration, Spiritual, and Journal (lined paper) inserts. All you do is carefully bend back the binding and tear out the sheets, which are hold-punched to fit in your binder.

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So, while I could have a traveler’s notebook where I assign a different insert booklet for each section I want to include in a faith planner, the Michael’s Creative Year booklets have pre-formatted pages, so I do not have to make up each section from scratch. The Spiritual set has a two-page spread for Daily Devotionals, a one-page spread for Topical Study, and plain lined paper for notes.

The Inspiration inserts have even more to offer. Each one contains 9 sets of sheets. The first page is for “monthly insights.” Behind it, the page includes “10 Things I Want to do This Month,” “I Challenge Myself To,” and “What I can Improve On.” On the next page, there are spaces for “10 Things I’m Grateful For,” and behind that page, a framed text space for your “Thought for the Month,” which is above “What I Learned This Month.” After that, there are two pages, the top of which read, “Reasons to Be” followed by categories for “Happy,” “Excited,” “Thoughtful,” “Energized,” “Creative,” “Healthy,” “Imaginative,” and “Compassionate.” I use the Journaling booklet for sermon notes as I find that the Spiritual booklet never has enough paper.

In addition to the booklet journals that are available for the binders, you can also purchase calendar sets, which come with a variety of tabbed cardstock separators for each month, and a plastic divider page to separate your calendar from the other sections of your planner. This year, I purchased the Blossom Bliss pack, as it matches the floral design on the planner. When combined, the booklets and calendar packs provide me with the perfect pages to keep up with my spiritual goals for the year.

I love that the insert pages are already decorated, so I don’t really feel the need to spend time making it pretty!

Each calendar pack has a different theme, which is carried through by the tabbed month separators. The calendar packs come with two pages of “Thoughts and Notes,” a month-view calendar layout, and a weekly spread. The weekly layouts come in either vertical or horizontal, depending on the calendar pack you purchase, and all of the layouts are undated. I usually purchased dated planners, but it does not bother me that these are undated as it doesn’t take long to fill in the dates, and I get to use different pen or marker colors, depending on how I want my planner to look. I use my monthly calendar spread to note church events and the weekly spreads are for gratitude journaling.

Finally, each Recollections Creative Year Binder Planner comes with a few standard items that you can use in your Faith Planner. They each contain 3 sets of paper for a “To Do” list, lined paper, and graph paper. There are also three, sturdy plastic tabbed page dividers, two of which have inspirational sayings. These are similar to the plastic divider that comes with the calendar packs. I tend to give the paper packs to my daughter and use the dividers in my faith planner with some stickers to categorize the divided section.

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What to Include in a Faith Planner

Of course, every person’s faith planner is going to depend on their personal needs, and I believe that you can use a faith or spiritual planner regardless of your religion. As long as your religion follows a spiritual text, you can likely put these inserts to good use. But, for those who want a list, here are some ideas for sections to include in a faith planner:

• Calendar
• Gratitude
• Devotional Notes (included in the Spiritual Journal booklet)
• Topical or Scripture Study Notes (included in the Spiritual Journal booklet)
• Small Group Study Notes
• Sermon or Homily Notes
• Prayer Lists
• Favorite Prayers
• Scripture Quotes
• Spiritual Goals
• Reflections on Times of Meditation
• Inspiration/Ideas

I personally have sections for Devotional Notes, Topical Study Notes, Inspiration/Ideas, a calendar for events and gratitude, Favorite Scripture Verses, and Favorite Prayers. But, in addition to having the planner itself and the insert sections, I also use some supplies that I think enhance a faith planner.

The Best Supplies for Faith Planners

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Frixion Pens are the best for writing in planners as the ink is bright and stays put until you choose to erase it. This year, I decided to color code my planner according to some new stickers, I used Frixion Color Sticks to fill in my monthly dates. (#Ad)

Frixion Fineliners are pretty new to the market. Although some of their colors are not as bright as their gel ink counterparts, they still offer a lot of variety. I also used these to fill in my monthly and weekly spreads. (#Ad)

I also use a Frixion retractable pen to write in the planner pages. I use 0.5mm pens as the planner is tiny and smaller writing looks better with the thinner line. These pens erase well on most paper, but do particularly well on the Creative Year paper inserts for my planner. (#Ad)

Monthly planning stickers are really helpful in setting up an undated planner. For Christmas this year, I received these colorful stickers and used them to decide on which color theme would be assigned to each month. (#Ad).

For those wanting to decorate Christian planners with stickers, I have a couple of suggestions. First, the Illustrated Faith line of stickers are bright and beautiful. They are printed on cardstock, so they’re sturdy too. Here are a couple of ones that I’ve used in my planners. (#Ad).

If you want to take your sticker decorations to the next level, you cannot beat Happy Planner sticker books. They come with literally hundreds of stickers in each booklet, and they are typically repositionable (at least at first), so you can change them out to see which ones look best on your planner pages. The first one I bought was the original Faith-themed sticker book. (#Ad).

After that, I added the limited edition Mini Faith sticker book, which had stickers that were even easier to use in my little personal-sized binder. (#Ad).

Finally, when I thought I had found every faith-themed Happy Planner sticker book, I stumbled upon the Faith Warrior sticker book, which has beautiful rose-gold foiled stickers. (#Ad).

While the binders come with plastic dividers, I find it helpful to include some other items to help me easily turn to what I use most, my calendar and the week in which I’m gratitude journaling. For that I use pretty binder clips (#Ad).

I also use colorful flagged paper clips to mark the month I’m in. (#Ad)

Finally, I do not take my faith planner to church, as I already bring my own bible. So, instead, I have a small clipboard that I use to hold the lined paper I use to take down sermon notes. (#Ad).

For my plastic tabbed dividers, I have used some of the word stickers from the sticker books above, along with a few words leftover from my bible tab set. (#Ad)

Beyond feeling like I’m a bit more organized, I find that having all of my faith and spiritual notes in one place is a helpful way to keep with my faith goals. At the end of the year, I look back on the sermons, devotionals, and days of gratitude to reflect on my journey.

Do you use a faith planner? What kind of planner do you use for faith or spiritual planning? Would you like to see how I’ve decorated mine or would a video be more helpful? Leave a comment below to let me know!

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