This is the week when there's no point in me trying to encourage you to save money and enjoy fabulous lives, because you've been practicing quantitative easing for weeks and, starting Monday, you're going to have to work like a dog to pay it off.

Instead, I thought I'd share some of the horror of this, one of the worst Xmases I've ever had. It has nonetheless provided a useful lesson, one that may help as you take stock of your plans for the year ahead. Misery loves company, so those of you who are fed up with the seemingly unending Winterval will enjoy my pain, and those of you who are doing OK can feel lucky that it didn't happen to you.

A few days ago, backing up my computer files, I deleted all my personal stuff and a third of my business stuff. Forty thousand files lost. Gone, forever. I don't know how it happened. I'd dearly like to blame Bill Gates and his evil minions, but the fact is that I must have done it all by myself. Had my work files not been so voluminous, I'd have deleted them too, and then I'd have had to retire, a broken man.

I've lost all my photos, 15 years of correspondence, money details, plans and dreams, unpublished work and much, much more that I can't bear to think about. From my perspective, it feels as if someone died, and that someone is me.

Christmas itself hadn't been so bad. I happened to be in London at the time, where I only now have one close friend, a fellow bachelor who also doesn't 'do' Christmas. "So you'll be in London for Christmas," he said. "That's great. We can ignore each other!"

I managed to dodge everyone on the day itself and also on Boxing Day, which generations of Crombies have enjoyed as the best day of the year, it being as far as possible from next Christmas. But just as everything was popping along, and I was planning the massive file transfer and pruning operation that I always spend New Year's Day doing, I accidentally wiped the files.

It was, as I said, a grave loss. A deep depression followed, numbed only slightly by sub-zero temperatures throughout the land, matching those in my psyche.

It's not that I used the files that much. They were mostly archival and I barely ever enter the archives. But they were my past and present, and without them, for a day or two, it felt as if I had no future. I had erased a part of my identity. I gave some serious thought to what to do with the rest of my life as more and more examples of what had been lost appeared in my thoughts. The Foreign Legion sounded briefly attractive, but I'm not French and they'd no doubt ask for personal details that I now don't have.

It was the second time I'd felt this odd sense of loss within a year. The first was when the money died, a period that ran from late 2008 until the middle of 2009. During that time, I read, some people stopped opening their bank statements for fear of the bad news they would contain. Others lost jobs and homes. Bermuda wasn't as badly affected as many, but try telling that to those whose lives were changed for the worse.

And now here it was, the end of 2009, and I was a loser all over again. To make matters worse, infuriatingly and erroneously, every gasbag in the known universe was droning on about it being the end of the decade, which it wasn't, even close. The decade ends a year from now; what is wrong with people?

The five stages of grief are shock; anger; more anger; killing someone; and then life on the run. Something like that. On Day Three, I bypassed the five-step programme and decided to suck it up and get on with it. As therapy, I decided not to even switch on the computer or read a newspaper for a couple of days, thus being forced outside my world altogether (except for news of football and the Second Test against South Africa).

Some advantages of my loss began to present themselves. Whatever damning evidence might have been in those files is now gone forever. If only I'd looted billions. If I'd pulled a Bernie Madoff and not been caught until this morning, the Feds would have had to let me go: no evidence. The perfect crime. I began to wonder why I kept personal files in the first place.

I concluded that the experience of losing the files was freeing, and have moved on to a New Year in which I'll doubtless do some other completely idiotic thing. Sigh.

So what does this have to do with you? Aha!

I'm not going to suggest that you wipe out your personal files. But maybe you and your financial affairs would benefit from the more relaxed approach I have subsequently been forced to take to my identity. If you're unhappy with the financial behaviour that has brought you to this New Year's Day, don't just mindlessly go ahead and repeat it this year. Wipe out the old ways and start anew. Save some money for a change. Think in advance when you go shopping. Buy a little less. Plan a staycation instead of another trip to Las Vegas this year. Take pride in your ability to look to the future. Be good to the older you that you will one day become.

Full disclosure requires me to tell you that I may have completed and saved an additional complete system backup before I left for England. If I did, the losses will be minimal and joy will be unconfined. Hope springs eternal.

There. An upbeat ending as a New Year begins.