Debt $ense

Welcome!
During the last few months I’ve become more and more interested in debt and personal finance as I try and pay down my own credit card debt. I started blogging about personal finance (PF) on my regular blog, and finally decided it was taking up enough space to deserve its own home.
My personal situation is that I’m a journalist in my late 20s trying to pay down the credit card debt I ran up while trying to live the lives my higher-paid friends have on a journalist’s salary. At one point, I hit about $11,000 in credit card debt, all on one card, plus about $9,000 in student loans. I don’t worry much about the student loans because I locked them in last year at the lowest possible interest rate and had a low enough balance to start that the monthly payments aren’t choking me.
My parents did all the right things – taught me to budget, gave me a subscription to Consumer Reports’ “Zillions” money magazine for kids, and generally educated me about money and how to handle it. I had great habits in high school, but college life wasn’t quite so compatible and I drifted away from them. Now I’m back in the groove, but need to get rid of the debt I incurred while I was young and foolish. (I’m still young, but hopefully no longer foolish.)
In the last year, I’ve paid down about $3,000 in credit card debt, and am on track to pay off the remaining $8,500 in the next 15 months. Read Debt $ense regularly and follow my progress, as well as pick up some tips I’ve learned along the way.