Nancy asked me to share my story in hopes of providing inspiration to those who read YMBD.com and are struggling financially.

I’m a professional man in mid-life, and it has been only recently that I was able to stop my deathly financial spiral. I hit financial bottom in the summer of 2001 and the future looked pretty bleak. I was on welfare and the opportunities in my newly chosen field of work – IT- disappeared with the dotcom crash. Thanks to the IT course I had just completed, and those awful years I struggled since 1995, I was seriously in debt.

It turned out that networking, meeting the right people was my saving grace. For me the old, tired, hackneyed saying, “Its not what you know, but who you know that counts” could not have rung truer. However up until the summer of 2001 my “networking” hadn’t paid off one lousy dime. Apparently I didn’t know the “right people”!

I was so angry and frustrated. Why was I in this mess? I had done all the “right things” to have a successful career and to live comfortably. I had two professional degrees. I was a registered professional in two provinces. I was “out there”. I stayed constantly in touch with potential employers. I participated in various clubs and activities and attended various professional events. But it seemed that whenever some great opportunity flashed in front of me, some ugly karmic force vapourized it. Anybody who tried to cheer me up by offering me advice through some cheap old hackneyed cliché was reciprocated with a vacant stare.

But nevertheless, in spite of my “bad karma” I kept at it. I wanted to give up, but I had no choice - I have too large an ego to ever declare bankruptcy. So in the summer of 2001, I continued to do all the “right things” to find a job even though by this time it all seemed in vain.

But all of a sudden, a mysterious disturbance in the karmic field of the planet occurred and I got a break.

It happened on the dock of the sailing club to which I belonged (my club dues were still outstanding!). There I struck up a conversation with someone I never saw at the club before. Turned out he knew one of my professors from graduate school and he owned a consulting firm in Yaletown! He hired me right on the spot. Apparently I knew one right person. I almost fell off the dock!

Three years later, though my financial spiral had come to a halt, I still wasn’t able to make a progress on my debt because my salary was just too low. Also, the office environment had degenerated considerably. Seven people had come and gone since I had joined. But it was only a seven man office!

I was miserable, but I because of my overbearing debt, I just couldn’t quit. I was trapped. I was desparately searching for another situation. Then one day I received an email from one of my ex-coworkers asking if I would be interested in a contract from the new firm for which he worked. Another disturbance of the global kharmic field had just taken place! I jumped immediately.

Two years later, I am still on the same contract. I am making more than twice the salary. The new field of work I am in is bursting at the seams and shows no signs of slowing down. Yes, I know that any good cannot last forever, but by the time this industry slows down, I will be well out of debt – unsecured debt that is – and will have socked enough money away in various investments to see me through any lean times. I also have fit in a couple trips to Thailand!

In another four months I will be out of debt – the first time since adolescence. It has been a bit of balancing act of diverting money towards debt and to investments such as RRSP’s and flow-through investments which reduce my income tax. Through taking advantage of various low interest rate balance transfer offers from my credit cards, I have been able to cut the astronomical credit card rates I used pay to an overall average of below 8%. This has taken some careful planning on my part to avoid the traps within the fine print of these deals. The tax savings I have reaped through my investments have allowed me to keep the tax man at bay and at the same time allow me to increase my financial self worth. A friend of mine used to repeat to me that it is not how much you make, but how much you keep that counts.

In spite of my recent good fortune, I am still cynical. I still roll my eyes when I hear those old shallow cliches. “Its always darkest before the dawn!” Please don’t remind me! Its hard not to be cynical at the best of times. Its even harder when you are down financially and you cannot see your way out of it.

I remember the character Chauncey Gardiner played by Peter Sellers in the movie “Being There”. Inspite of starting out homeless in the movie and being somewhat dim, Chauncey ended up in pretty good shape. Chauncey made it big by repeating the only thing he learned in life to the right people. It went something like this:

If the roots are firmly planted, then the garden will survive the winter and grow again in the spring.

In spite of being an idiot, even Chauncey knew how to turn his karma around.