Month Two! Thing haven’t gone quite as well as I hoped this month.

Both my Virgin credit card (for work) and Barclaycard went up in balance by 4.97% (£495). This is for a single reason, that being that I have dont a few days work this month away from Birmingham. As a result, I have put on travel expenses, and also was eating out a bit more than I hoped. Since I can’t claim back all my meals from work, I put some of the meal costs on my personal credit card.

In the next week or so, I’ll be refunding some money on my Virgin card, which should reduce the balance on that.

Another change is that I am going to be cancelling my Barclaycard. While it has the lowest rate of interest, it has a significant balance on it and it makes sense to move it to an Interest-Free card. So I’ve applied for a Halifax Credit Card, which currently offers 20 months interest-free, with around a 3% balance transfer charge. This means I’ll be paying about £80 in fees, but since my interest is around £45 per month, I will recover that in two months, leaving 18 interest-free to help reduce the debts.

The scary thing is that for a time, I will have 5 credit cards. But its only for a week or two.

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