I was in the Canadian Air Cadet programme. I won scholarships to get my glider license when I was 16, and my power license when I was 17. Unfortunately, towards teh very end of my power license (about 10 hours to go) I was involved in a very bad car accident (as a passenger) - suffered a serious head injury, fractured neck, and was comatose for a few days. Obviously my aviation medical was revoked for a couple of years. My dream had always been to be a fighter pilot, but i had to give that up obviously. I turned to other thigns, got my degree in engineering, master's in mathematics and PhD in computer science. I basically forgot all about flying for many, many years. It wasn't until i was about 29, when i moved to Ottawa to work for the federal government, that I came back to flying. I lived by the airport, and often saw the Katanas taking off. So I decided to finish my license, and decided to build an RV shortly after. Been building for 3 years, and have used a line-of-credit, but don't regret that at all... with a 100K/yr secure government job, and currently low interest rates, I'm quite confident that paying the debt will not be a problem. I also built a hangar last year, which definately required the line of credit.
Almost 34 years old now, a baby girl at home, and the RV is almost finished. All in all, life is great, and building the RV has a lot to do with that. I don't second-guess my decision to finance the hangar and part of hte plane at all. It'll be paid off in a few years.
The only bad thing about getting back into flying is that I now often regret deeply that my dream of being a fighter pilot was destroyed. Recently I discovered that a guy I leanred to fly gliders with when we were 16 (Jeremy Hanson), was a fighter pilot and is now a new Canadian astronaut... and I can't help but be really jealous and wonder what could have been in store for me if the accident hand't killed my dream so long ago.