Buying a round of drinks in a pub isn’t usually a spectator sport but when I punched my PIN number into the card terminal in my local, a cheer went up. As the clock struck midnight on 26 November this year, my friends and family gathered round to watch me make my first purchase in a year.

Twelve months earlier, on Black Friday 2015, I’d committed myself to jumping off the consumer bandwagon and shaking up my relationship with money: I pledged not to spend anything for a year. Having worked as a personal financial journalist for 10 years, my friends, family and colleagues assumed I was brilliant with money – but that wasn’t strictly true.

Although I had no debt, my bank statements (when I bothered to look at them) were littered with unnecessary spending. When I did brace myself and look at my statements I was aghast at how much of my wages I frittered away mindlessly. I totted up that I’d spent £400 in one year on takeaway coffees alone. (A huge amount given I’m not even a coffee fan.) Not to mention the meals out, rounds of drinks, clothes and other random spending.

Then, in September 2013, my husband Frank and I bought a big ‘doer-upper’ house in north London with a hefty mortgage, in attempt to climb the property ladder. We couldn’t afford to keep on our old house as well as renovate so we put most of our possessions in storage.