I certainly did. We consistently lived off about half of my income and saved the other half.
I've owned four vehicles over forty years, three bought new and one bought two-years-old. I never took expensive vacations.
When I was in my early twenties I scrimped to make up a down payment on a tract home. I did this by working twenty hours of overtime a week for two years. This was while my peers were buying expensive sports cars and partying all the time.
My wife and I believe that the money spent on the typical wedding is criminally insane. Ours cost about fifty bucks.
I spent the first five years of married life working full time and taking university classes.
Could I tolerate a market crash right now? Yes. It would mean that I would have to give up high-speed internet, satellite TV, and a bunch of other non-essentials. There would be other adjustments as well. Yes, it was part of a plan to be retired early, to live comfortably, and to adjust without regrets to life's surprises.
One thing I definitely didn't do was trust the government to take care of me. I resent having made all the sacrifices I did while "watching the grasshoppers play" and now they are whining that things are not working out. If I saw their pain coming, why didn't they?
And to really top of the discussion, I should point out that their pain hasn't even begun. It's going to get much, much worse. I can hardly wait for when the younger generation realizes the trick that our generation has played on them. They are going to be PISSED.
Who leaves their own grandchildren twenty trillion dollars in debt? Who leaves them with almost two-hundred trillion dollars in unfunded entitlement liabilities? Who leaves them with an aging infrastructure of crumbling highways and bridges they won't be able to maintain?
I hope they enjoy their abandoned wind-mills and high speed train-to-nowhere here in Kalifornia. They can use the train cars as make-shift shelters when the rains return.
Good for you. I'm guessing based on his pension and Social Security, this guy didn't make enough to live on half his income. I'm guessing he did well to live from paycheck to paycheck. When you are not the sharpest knife in the drawer, sometimes just not being on the public dole is a good thing. That being said he earned his pension and that is being taken away from him. To think that times could never be hard enough for everything to be taken away from you except cable and a few other things.......well I hope you are right....cause sometimes when it comes to compassion what goes around comes around.