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.