I’ve been reading Shawn’s website for most of 2011 and I’ve just signed up as a subscriber. If you enjoy his stuff, then do the same, then go subscribe to the B&B Podcast

Welcome to the first installment of my personal debt posts as I account for my spending and attempt to reduce my debt by £3000 in 2012.

With this being January, I have taken balances as of the 1st, and will continue to do so each month.

To summise, I currently have 4 credit cards, each with a balance on them. One of these, a Virgin Money card, is almost clear, and is intended to be useds for business expenses and should be paid off each month. However I am including this for completeness, and ot show I’m not just accumulating more debt elsewhere.

In addition to these four cards, I also have a loan on my car, which is being paid off over a fixed period of 5 years, and accounts for £166 of my outgoings each month. This is not going to be included on my report.

So with this, please find below the details for January 2012. I will be showing a breakdown by card, totals and percentage changes, month on month. Clearly for January, this is 0% as I am counting from today.

A few years ago I came across Consumerism Commentary and the monthly updates. The writer, Flexo, was being public about his income and expenditure, and posting his monthly balance sheets to his blog as a way of being publicly accountable for his spending. He started in 2003, and recently stopped posting these in October of 2011.

As many other people in the UK do, have a growing amount of debt in my life and want to reduce this to zero. I know thats a big task to accomplish, and will take me a long time, but I decided I wanted ot share my progress online.

Unlike Flexo, I’ll only be posting the monthly changes in my credit card balances. I have some additional debt, which I’ll detail in the first of the series, which I won’t cover, since its pre-determined in its type.

My goal is reduce overall debt by £3000 by the end of they year.

After listening to Marco Arment and Shawn Blanc talk about the Aeropress coffee maker, I was convinced this was a great present idea for my wife for Christmas.

I actually found it cheaper at Café Blend, an independent coffee shop run by grumpy staff, than on Amazon.
In the time it takes the kettle to boil the water, you can grind your beans, set up the Aeropress and then it takes about a minute in total to push the water through, top it up for an Americano, or drink for an espresso.

Highly recommended.

I subscribe to TechRepublic’s Mac Blog to keep up with their articles as there is often some useful information there.
However their latest ‘Top 10′ list seems to miss the mark for the so called ‘Apple ‘Geek.

In particular:

Skyrim, available for Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows

…and…

The last item on my list is the Microsoft Kinect

Like most households, our letterbox is subject to no end of paper documents that never seem to stop coming. When I can, I go paperless with e-billing direct with the company. Three do it, as does EDF and a few others. But I still get bank statements, credit card bills and loads of other stuff in the post.

Recently I bought a Lexmark P205 S500 Printer/Fax/Scanner/Copier All-In-One device from Best Buy at Merry Hill. It seemed to be the best combination of affordable, support for Mac OS X and included an Auto Document Feeder (ADF) which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of paper I have to scan.

After unboxing and setting it up, I installed the included software on my MacBook Air and gave it a test scan.

The included software allows you to scan with its own Scan Center, or you can use Image Capture which is built-in to Lion. I gave both a try, but neither offered the sort of functionality I needed given I was archiving a few years of documents.

I took a look around at other software available. I tried Yep which offers a really nice interface for browsing files, such as PDFs, txt, images and some other file formats, and gives you the ability to tag them with keywords to help you sort and organise them.

I also took a look at the demo for PDFPen from Smile Software. It is probably the most well known PDF editing software besides Adobe Acrobat, and at a fraction of the cost, you can understand why. It will let you mark up, redact, join and split PDFs, and OCR your PDFs. However it isn’t built for bulk scanning.

I finally took a look at PDFScanner (iTunes Link), available in the Mac App Store. It offers a basic way of scanning but had a few features that made it ideal for me.

Firstly it allows you to scan in as many pages as you like. Once scanned in, PDFScanner automatically deskew’s and OCR’s each page. You can then scroll through the thumbnails of each page, and drag to reorder them. If you scanned in a long document, you hit Save and name your file, or use the auto-naming setting to build one based on date and time scanned. If you have scanned in multiple pages from multiple documents at once, as I have done, you can select the necessary pages and click Save Selected. This makes it really simple to just scan a bunch of pages and deal with them later.

The last stage of my paperless solution I have still to decide on, is the organisation. I have been putting some PDFs into Evernote, which allows me to sync the documents to the internet, and access them on my iPhone or iPad, as well as use Evernote’s own OCR for searching and tagging documents. The other option is to manage them locally, which I could either do by date or by subject/company.

Either way, I’m on my way to archiving my old documents and clearing a lot of paperwork. For £10.49, PDFScanner is a good spend, and was fit for my task.