This week, a combined follow-up on the various horrors that can stop you ? and are certainly stopping me ? from getting rich fast, slow, or ever.

We start with a remarkable coincidence. Just a couple of weeks ago, I advised that it would be a good idea to reconcile your bank statements, and explained a little about how to do it. In that column, I said that, despite decades of reconciling my bank account, I had never caught my bank in a mistake.

Hey presto, I found one just this week: $504 deducted from my account for "cheque". I have not written a cheque for that much in the past year. "Cheque" not being sufficient information for me to know what was going on, I called the bank. I explained to an initially friendly lady that I had no record of a cheque for that amount. Could she tell me what the cheque number was?

She could. She did. The cheque number was nowhere near my present chequebook. It might be an old cheque, she said, which was true, except that there were no old cheques outstanding for $504 on my last reconciliation. I looked into it and found that I hadn't written a cheque with that kind of number in ten years. Apparently, the bank had made a mistake.

The lady seemed suspicious when I told her that. She said that I would have to pay a fee of $15 for her to investigate the item. Fine, I said, "but if it turns out to be your mistake, will you pay the $15?" I asked.

"Me?' the woman replied, shocked.

I rephrased the question. "If the bank has debited the $504 to me in error, will I still have to pay the $15?"

The answer was that I am going to get stuck with the $15 fee, even if it is the bank's mistake. That cannot possibly be right, and I'm certain that when the enquiry is completed, I will receive a credit for the $504 taken from my account in error, my $15 fee back, and perhaps an apology thrown in for good measure. If I'm wrong about that, I'll eat my hat. (First, though, I'd have to buy a hat.)

So that problem is minor and likely to be resolved. I am far less optimistic that I will do as well with the utter horror show that my Dad's estate has turned into.

I wrote some weeks ago about the many thefts that had occurred from the estate, carried out by "professionals" passing themselves off as solicitors, estate agents and the tax authorities. I won't bore you with all the details again, but I will summarise developments in the past few weeks. This is partly to make me feel better, but mostly to warn those who will one day have to deal with the loss of their second British parent of the flavour of what they have to look forward to. It then issued a supplementary tax demand for an enormous amount, plus interest yet to be calculated. Luckily, I happen not to have spent the money, and so will be able to pay the extra tax. If I had spent the money, even though the mistake was theirs, not mine, I'd be going to jail for a very long time.His out-of-the-blue offer to do so was the key reason I chose that estate agent. He appointed a firm of lawyers who exist only to do his firm's conveyancing cheaply. Their offices do not even have a sign outside their office.

In direct contravention of instructions from both sides, the lawyer charged me the conveyancing costs, in effect stealing from what little remains of my Dad's estate. Neither the solicitor nor the estate agent has answered any of my many letters since I discovered this.

I have had to contact the Ombudsman for Estate Agents, a government body set up to resolve such issues and also the Law Society, which theoretically regulates British legal practitioners. The Law Society, of course, exists solely to protect its own. It has not bothered to reply.

I phoned the Ombudsman to explain the details. A nice woman told me that although I have an excellent case ? the theft could not have been more egregious, or more clearly documented ? I should prepare to lose, since "very few cases are resolved in favour of the general public".

If I go to the Ombudsman and lose, I forfeit the right to sue anyone to get my money back, nor may one appeal a decision of the Ombudsman.

Luckily, since this fraud is a joint effort, I can lose at the Ombudsman's office and still sue the lawyer.

Bad as that all is, it is by no means the worst of it. The policy was cancelled on the house as of the day it was sold. The insurance company, Royal & Sun Alliance, acknowledged the cancellation. A few weeks later, the company issued a "final demand" for the premium on a policy no longer in existence. The insurer acknowledged its error, although it continued to refuse to issue a refund for the overpayment made when the policy was in force.

Then, and I still can't believe this part, the company systematically went about destroying my brother's credit rating for not paying the premium on the non-existent policy. The company then stopped answering letters. My brother has taken the case up with the Ombudsman for Insurance. Despite being right, he will probably lose too, and his credit rating is shot.

I promise you that I will not let this stand. I am about to devote as much of the rest of my life as is necessary to break Royal & Sun Alliance and put it out of business. If you have shares, sell them. This company is going down. Do whatever you like to me, but you will not vindictively damage my loved ones through stupidity and abuse of power and expect to be able to survive long enough to do it to anyone else ever again.

All of this is to underline just how important it is that you save some money, because many great organisations are built with the malicious intent of cheating you out of what is rightfully yours, and governments tend to come down on the side of big companies, who are big taxpayers. Financially, justice can be as hard to come by for the little man as a needle in a haystack. The world is stacked against us, and sometimes we must take extraordinary steps to cope.

I hope someone from Royal & Sun Alliance's Bermuda partners (if they have any) reads this and corrects my brother's situation at high speed. If not, expect to see me in the headlines rather than writing them.