Have you heard of Plum Paper?
I heard about this company through a friend and then Instagram (again, marketing for the win). I looked them up and the idea of something completely customizable was immensely appealing.
If you’ve been following me for a while, I’ve had quite a few planners over the years on this blog. More recently, I’ve been looking more for something that I can have literally everything in my life in one book. As much as it’d be nice to have multiples (more stickers!) it’s just not feasible for me to bounce between a family one, a blog one, an exercise one, a budget one, etc. Carrying that all around with two kids? Thanks, but no thanks.
The Basics
Like the majority of planners, the Plum Paper has certain parts that can’t be changed.
All planners come with the Year at a Glance, Special dates, Ideas/Plans/Goals, Front of nad Back of Tabs, monthly spread, dotted notes pages, a contacts page, a passwords page, and a double-sided pocket.
Let’s Get Customizing!
The first thing you get to pick is what size planner you would like. Plum Paper offers 3 different sizes (which is pretty standard for most companies) and they offer a ton of different cover designs.
Picking out your cover page, you can add text to the bottom of the cover and the year. Fonts, colours, frames, it’s all changeable.
Then you can pick your layout. Plum Paper offers the vertical, horizontal, monthly, daily, grid, teacher, student, financial, and goal-setting layout. The basics start at $35USD and the more specialized ones are just a couple of dollars more. There are so many options that I can’t write about all of them here, you’ll just have to go to the site to check them out. In this as well they have options for customized text areas as well.
We get to choose the colour scheme, start month, week start day, and how many months you want. There’s the option to add custom special dates and holidays. Pick your binding (between spiral, disc, or loose) and then we’re onto the add-ons.
The Add-Ons
These all cost under $5USD depending on the number of pages that are in the add-on and how many you’re putting in.
You can choose from Home, Business, Lifestyle, Teacher, Student, Notes, Lists, Creative, Stickers and Page Protectors. Some are bundles that have helpful tips or lists of relevant information, and some are single pages that can be inserted at the end of each month.
There are options for food/meal planning, budget and general housekeeping. They have social media, colouring pages, fitness, self-care, travel, school trackers, and habit trackers.
Accessories
They have a bunch of additional accessories to add to your order. Bookmarks, clips, pen-loops, stickers, dashboards, and folio covers.
My Plum Paper Planner
Alright. Let’s break down what I ended up going with.
I went with the 7×9″ spiral-bound, vertical, hourly layout. I added my blog name to the bottom of my cover, the year at the top and my initials in the centre. In my weekly layout, I customized my left-hand panel to say To Do, and Instagram so I could keep track of what I will be posting that week. The bottom of my day is Dinner so I can meal plan for the week. I decided to go for a Sunday start this time around because I’m constantly flipping back and forth with a Monday start when I do the majority of my planning on Sundays.
At the end of every month, I added a page for budget, blog planning, a to-do list, and monthly cleaning.
The larger add-ons I chose were for Home and Meal Planning.
Under the Home tab, I have a breakdown for home service providers, seasonal maintenance, master cleaning guides, laundry guide (won’t like… I got it for this), a garden guide, family favourite meals, monthly goals, home projects, gift lists, shopping list, passwords, yearly expense overview, and important contacts.
Under the Meals tab, it has a breakdown for a meal builder, cooking guidelines/conversions, substitutions, shopping lists, weekly meal planning chart, grocery store/take out restaurants favourites and an annual grocery spending tracker. I’m pretty excited and terrified to see what I spend annually on groceries for a family of four.
Then there are the extra dot paper for notes, contact list, and another password page right before the double-sided pocket.
Final Thoughts on the Plum Paper Planner
I’ve only been using this for one week as it’s the first week of January but so far I’m enjoying it. I loved the process of customizing it for sure. There are something’s I thought I’d need but probably won’t use as much as I thought. I think the blog planning stuff will be hit or miss right now; possibly note pages would have been better? Only time will tell in regards to that.
I like it being spiral bound because even though I could have used the disc punched inserts from Happy Planner, the one thing I don’t like is how disc punched books open, especially if they have a lot of pages. Spiral-bound is much smoother. Plus you can fit a pen easier in the spirals.
I also got the Social media snap-in dashboard, instead of a bookmark. It’s nice because I can move it to each week plus it’s like a whiteboard so I can just update it weekly if needed. I’ve also added some paper clips to highlight sections that I need to access quickly because there are a lot of pages!
So far, I’m pleased and looking forward to seeing how it goes. The one thing I don’t like so far: They duplicate the end weeks? So January will have the week Sunday 30 to February Saturday 5, but then you go to February and the first week is the 30th to 5th. So there will be some random blank spaces or a whole week that has nothing written. Aesthetically it’s just not appealing to me? I’ve also never had a planner that does this, either.
I hope that this helps you pick out a new planner!
This planner doesn’t do it for you? Check out my review of the Happy Planner (I did use for 2 years in a row), the Passion Planner (I used for 3 years) or going way back to 2015 the Erin Condren Life Planner (I used it for 2 years and is a terrible review, I’m sorry), or the Kate Spade planner (I used for 1 year. I even did my own bullet journal one year, so you can check that out too.
Let me know what you think!
J x
