Saving is very hard to do. My wife and I stopped using credit two years ago. I mean NO loan for anything. It is different now. We were thinking about redoing the kitchen the other day. We talked and decided that we didn’t want to redo it enough to pull the money from savings. You think about things differently when the money is going to leave your hands, verses ‘giving yourself a loan’ with credit cards. We aren’t rich, but we are comfortable and working towards being rich. And that is worth much more to me than someone seeing me driving a BMW. Our finances are such- 15% from each of our checks goes into our 401Ks each payday. We have no loans (including the house) and a large sum in a money market account as our emergency fund (job loss, sickness, etc). We don’t charge anything, so we have to have the cash for it or we save for a big item such as a car. A friend told me the other day that he and his wife are trying to do the same thing, but finding it very hard to stop using credit. The ‘want it now’ mentality if powerfull.