2018 should be an interesting year - I turn 30 (just two more years until a really significant round number). To kick it off, I'm giving up a few things for January...

Alcohol

Nothing surprising or controversial about this. I've done "dry January" for a few years now, and I find it helps me lose a bit of weight, save a few quid, and best of all, it reduces my alcohol consumption over the rest of the year by lowering my tolerance through the month off.

Cash

From 13 January in the UK (and the rest of the EU), the law will prevent merchants from charging extra for payment by card. I nearly exclusively use debit or credit cards these days anyway (Monzo is great), so now seems like a good time to try and run on them 100% and see how it goes. I find it much easier to budget if I have a full list of what I spent where, and obviously a card and a decent app allow that to be assembled automatically rather than from receipts. As recently as six months ago, there would have been a few blockers to my attempting this - but now that the buses and all the parking meters in Oxford take cards, it should be straightforward.

Amazon

While digging through my Amazon history to pull some receipts for an expenses claim at work, I was mildly horrified to see how much I'd spent personally with Amazon in 2017. I won't go into details, but taking a month off supporting one of the giants of capitalism should be good for my soul (and wallet).

I'll report back in February on how all this went...