Beware of the Train

Last year I made three New Year's Resolutions:

1. Get better at dealing with money.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Make a first ascent in the Greater Ranges.

Number 2 was an obvious success: I finished the Edinburgh Marathon in 4:24:04, and raised nearly £900 for the Against Malaria Foundation. I'd been hoping to get a slightly faster time than that, but I lost several weeks of training to a chest infection near to the end of my training programme, so in the end I was very happy to finish under 4:30. The actual running was... mostly Type II fun, but also much less miserable than many of my training runs, even at mile 21 when I realised that literally everything below my navel hurt. Huge thanks to everyone who sponsored me!

Number 3 was an equally obvious failure. My climbing partner and I picked out an unclimbed mountain in Kyrgyzstan and got a lot of the logistics sorted, but then he moved house and started a new job a month before we were due to get on a plane to Bishkek. With only a few weeks to go and no plane tickets or insurance bought yet (and them both being much more expensive than we'd expected - we'd checked prices months earlier, but forgot how steeply costs rise as time goes on), we regretfully pulled the plug. We're planning to try again in 2016 - let's hope all the good lines don't get nabbed by Johnny-come-lately Guardian readers.

Number 1 was a partial success. I tried a number of suggestions from friends who appear to have their financial shit more together than me (not hard), but couldn't get any of them to stick. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the end of 2014; I don't want to use that as an excuse, but it does mean that some things that come easily to most people are genuinely difficult for me - and financial mismanagement is apparently very common among people with ADHD. The flip-side, though, is that I have a license to do crazy or unusual things if they help me be effective, because I have an actual medical condition.

I've now set up the following system:

• my salary (minus taxes and pension contributions) is paid into Account 1;
• a couple of days later, most of it is transferred by standing order into Account 2;
• all bills are paid from Account 2 by direct debit, and Account 2 should maintain enough of a balance for them to always clear;
• money left in Account 1 is available for spending on day-to-day things;
• if I pay for something on a credit card, I pay it off from Account 1 (if small) or Account 2 (if big) as soon as possible;
• Account 2 pays interest up to a certain ceiling; above that I'm going to transfer money out into a tax-efficient Account 3, which pays less interest but which doesn't have a ceiling.

I'll have to fine-tune the amount left in Account 1 with practice, but this system should ensure that bills get paid, I can easily see how much money I have left to spend for the month, and very little further thought or effort on my part is required.

While I was in there, I took the opportunity to set up a recurring donation to the Against Malaria Foundation for a few percent of my net salary - less than the 10% required to call yourself an Official Good Person by the Effective Altruism movement, but I figure I can work up to it.

It's too early to say whether the system will work out, but setting it up has already been a beneficial exercise - before, I had seven accounts with five different providers, most of them expired and paying almost zero interest (in one file, I found seven years' worth of letters saying "Your investment has expired and is now paying 0.1% gross interest, please let us know what you want us to do with it.") I now have only the three accounts described above, from two different providers, so it should be much easier to keep track of my overall financial position. Interest rates currently suck in general, but Accounts 2 and 3 at least pay a bit.

I've also started a new job that pays more, and wormwood_pearl's writing is starting to bring in some money. We're trying not to go mad and spend our newfound money several times over, but we're looking to start replacing some broken kit over the next few months rather than endlessly patching things up.

What else has happened to us?

I had a very unsuccessful winter climbing season last year; I was ill a lot from the stress of marathon training, and when I wasn't ill the weather was terrible. I had a couple of good sessions at the Glasgow ice-climbing wall, but only managed one actual route. Fortunately, it was the classic Taxus on Beinn an Dothaidh, which I'd been wanting to tick for a while. I also passed the half-way mark on the Munros on a beautiful crisp winter day in Glencoe.

One by one, my former research group's PhD students finished, passed their vivas, submitted their corrections, and went off, hopefully, to glittering academic careers or untold riches in Silicon Valley. Good luck to them all.

In June, I did the training for a Mountain Leadership award, the UK's introductory qualification for leading groups into the hills. Most of the others on the course were much fitter than me and more competent navigators, but the instructor said I did OK. To complete the award, I'll need to log some more Quality Mountain Days and do a week-long assessment.

In July, we went to Mat Brown's wedding in Norfolk, and caught up with some friends we hadn't seen IRL for far too long. Unlike last year, when it felt like we were going to a wedding almost every weekend, we only went to one wedding this year; I'm glad it was such a good one. Also, it was in a field with camping available, which really helped to keep our costs down.

In July, I started a strength-training cycle. I've spent years thinking that my physical peak was during my teens, when I was rowing competitively (albeit badly) and training 15-20 hours a week, so I was surprised to learn that I was able to lift much more now than I could then - 120kg squats versus around 90kg (not counting the 20kg of body weight I've gained since then). Over the next few weeks, I was able to gain a bit more strength, and by the end I could squat 130kg. I also remembered how much I enjoy weight training - so much less miserable than cardio.

In August, we played host to a few friends for the Edinburgh Fringe, and saw some great shows, of which my favourite was probably Jurassic Park.

In September, we went to Amsterdam with friends for a long weekend, saw priceless art and took a canal tour; then I got back, turned around within a day and went north for a long-awaited hiking trip to Knoydart with my grad-school room-mate. There are two ways to get to Knoydart: either you can take the West Highland Line right to the end at Mallaig, then take the ferry, or you can get off at Glenfinnan (best known for the viaduct used in the Harry Potter films) and walk North for three days, sleeping in unheated huts known as bothies. We did the latter, only it took us six days because we bagged all the Munros en route. I'm very glad we did so. The weather was cold but otherwise kind to us, the insects were evil biting horrors from Hell, and the starfields were amazing. It wasn't Kyrgyzstan, but it was the best fallback Europe had to offer.

In October, I started a new job at Red Hat, working on the OpenStack project, which is an open-source datacenter management system. It's a huge, intimidating codebase, and I'm taking longer than I'd like to find my feet, but I like my team and I'm slowly starting to get my head around it.

That's about it, and it's five minutes to the bells - Happy New Year, and all the best for 2016!