Regular Savings: `I'm covered for a rainy day, like the time I crunched my car'

When he wasn't worrying about the antics of his namesake in Dallas, Cliff Barnes spent most of the 1980s worrying about money: why he always seemed to have plenty when he didn't need it, but never when he did. "I could never get my head round it," confesses this well-paid computer sales manager. "There didn't seem to be any kind of link between the size of my pay cheque and the amount of money I actually had to spend."

As for saving he cheerfully admits to being erratic in the extreme, with no real financial planning: "One summer I picked up about pounds 10,000 in sales bonus and commission and thought I should do something sensible with it - so I stuck pounds 5,000 in a unit trust, stuck a few hundred in my old building society book and took a girl to Marbella for a couple of weeks.

"By Christmas that year business was dreadful and so was the money. That's the trouble in this game, more than half your earnings are dependent on sales. Even after emptying the Woolwich piggy bank, things were more than a bit tight until well into the New Year."

After several more years of boom to bust living, Mr Barnes was persuaded to start saving regularly by a girlfriend who "earned a lot less than me but could still walk into a dealer and write a cheque for the deposit on a new car without blinking because she had always been brought up to save regularly."

The first priority was a personal pension - with a hefty initial payment to start catching up on the years during which he had made no provision for retirement. "It's one of those things you always mean to do but somehow never get round to," he admits. He was attracted by the Equitable Life pension with its mutual structure and reputation for low charges.

Next on the list was to find a way of smoothing out the highs and lows of Mr Barnes's earnings. "We decided to put at least one-third of my commission into a high-interest account," he says. "You can't get at the money for 90 days but because of the way my commission is paid I always know two or three months ahead how I'm doing - so if I'm going to need to draw on it, I can fill in the chit now and get the cash after the waiting time is up."

The third piece in his savings jigsaw was a regular savings commitment: pounds 50 a month into an instant access account, topped up by whatever is left in the current account on pay day. "We call it the Christmas club because that's what we generally do with it, put it towards a few days in the sun over Christmas or New Year. It's also there for a rainy day, like the time I crunched the car just after I had gone on to the full no-claims rate."

After five years of the new regime, Mr Barnes says he is much less worried about money than he used to be. "To be honest, I still go into the red but I know I can cover it in a couple of months, and so does the bank manager. I used to get lots of stroppy letters from him, but not any more."