Weight 14st (ish), Debt £17,000 (ish), Sex one week ago, Alcohol - Sunday

Apologies for my many, many fans who were dedicated followers of this blog (yeah right) for the fact that I was quiet over the summer.

Lets just say I was focussing as much effort as possible on reducing my debt, coz that thing was really starting to get me down.

Make no mistake, it's still huge, but it gets more manageable each month and I'm still on track to have crushed the bugger by this time next year.

The plan for the summer was letting our our spare room, and it worked. We were busy through the summer months taking in a variety of students and our overdraft is now hacked to about £70. Not bad given that before the summer it wandered around anywhere from £2,000 to £3,000.

The trouble with an overdraft that size is that charges, interest and penalities were sometimes another £150 a month, which was just dragging us deeper under.

On top of that I managed to pay a little extra off the credit card (one of) and we've kept up repayments on our loans - so the debt really is coming down.

Despite the size of this thing I've strictly avoided entering into IVA or IVF or whatever else it is that lets you write off all your debt and only pay back what you can afford. I've heard bad things from those who regret joining up, and are now locked into increasing payments they still can't afford while having no way to sell off their assets to raise cash.

One has been told he will need to renegotiate everything four years into the five year deal, and will probably have to re re re mortgage his house. Nice.

I'm not sure if I ever said how I got into debt. Needless to say it wasn't my fault (just like jails are full of innocent people). Four years ago I was debt free - then we bought our first house. We had to plough all our savings into raising a deposit, and that only bought us a house that needed a lot of work.

That work set us back a lot of cash, half way through it my car exploded and needed to be replaced, then we got ripped off by a dodgy builder who ended up costing us four-times more than we estimated for his project.

All in all, things span out of control faster than we could cover them and this was before the recession, so loan and credit card companies were queuing up to throw more money at us than we could realistically afford to pay back.

No flash cars, no exotic holidays, no gambling, no Champagne lifestyle. Just life.

Lets just say we won't make those mistakes again, and here's hoping we can get out of the mess before Christmas 2010.