It's all about me.

I imagine that we all have the level of conceit at one point in our lives that I had in the middle of 1994, it comes from some inner place in our psychological universe and I would be surprised if others have never experienced it.

I was riddled with it back in 1985, after my long stint in California at McDonnell Douglas, I arrived back to Wigan in the UK like some returning astronaut with an inflated ego and belief that I was better than the average working class man.

That soon changed back.

In 1994 when I left Dowty it was like I was following the yellow brick road to Menasco across in Oakville, so much money and in my tiny mind, the same workload, less responsibility and an accelerated financial plan as a result of it all.

Freedom fifty-five!

If I read my diary correctly though, very rapidly in those first months the avalanche of new money I was earning was being eclipsed by new things to buy in the small amount of hours left in the week and all the money was being consumed. I remember thinking this at the time, the phenomenon of how a puddle of water takes the shape of the ditch that it arrives in.

Douglas Adams memories there.

How many times in life can we make the same mistakes, our spending matching or exceeding our income and regardless of all our efforts the debt hole continuing to grow bigger?

It is all about me, and within a few months of working all hours "god sends" the realization with a capital "Z" arrived that we had wandered off the path and we started to curtail our "polo pony" ways to settle into a spend less, save more type arrangement.

Yet still have fun.

I could credit Dave Chilton (of Wealthy Barber fame) for this eventual change in our collective habits regarding money, but I prefer to give it to another man, someone who gives me a smile as I remember him, someone who said once that myself and the lovely Karen would be "as right as ninepence" in our little townhouse in Oshawa. A man who told me that as long as I was earning steak money and eating pies that I would always be happy.

Ron Barlow.
xx