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Saved money from my first jobs. I mostly spent it on CDs which are nice to have a collection of, but kinda useless to me now. Ultimately it doesn't make much difference because it wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme, but if I had invested it early it could have maybe made my life better now.
Most of us do something like that when we first get money we earned ourselves, myself included. Depending on when you did actually stopped wasting money, this may have had a massively positive impact on your life. If you learned that lesson fairly early, it translated into you making wise spending choices as an older adult. You are successful today because you wasted that money back then and made changes afterward.
Struggling taught me the value of saving. I was still in highschool and working for minimum wage when I moved out on my own, and that was when I stopped wasting money. I was more concerned with securing my next meal. Experiencing it at that age absolutely influenced my habits into adulthood, to the point I agree about calling it a personal success - that is to say I'm still poor, but nowhere near as screwed as I would be if I had to learn that lesson today.
Struggling taught me that if I don't use my money right now it'll be gone.
And I'm not saying that to contradict you. It's funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn't spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that's the lesson I took for years. I didn't really start saving seriously until I was closing in on 40. I have money in retirement now (and will likely retire early), but it's because I did without for a few years trying to play catch up while making good money. It's not a tactic I recommend. If I had started it back when I was 18 I could be really close to retirement right now.
This is something others had to explain to me as I didn't experience this first hand.
In case others are reading this there's a few extra points to gaining the understanding of this concept. An example of this may be:
You have come into $100 without it being allocated to anything. If you wait "too long" a bill/need will show up that will consume all of that $100 (and probably still leave you needing more). However, if you spend the $100 as soon as you get it, you can buy a nice pair of sneakers or a video game. The bill will still come, and you'll still be in debt at the end, but you'll have your sneakers/video game. So this mindset incentivizes spending immediately instead of saving. An additional angle on this is that you may not have the bill/need but someone in your life does, and if you have $100 and don't volunteer it, or refuse to "lend" it when its discovered, there are large social consequences. So again, spending it immediately is incentivized, because there are no social consequences for not having the money to "lend", only having the money and not "lending" it.
This is far more common that I had understood initially.
This is exactly it. I'm glad you could explain it better than I could. I still don't understand it necessarily, but I don't understand a lot of what I lived so I'll survive.
I mean I really only solved it by having accounts I don't look at (emergency fund, retirement), accounts I use regularly (bill pay, "entertainment") and an accountant who helped me set it up so I wasn't spending every dime. It can be done by yourself but I wasn't psychologically prepared. I'm also the only employee of my LLC so there's a business account but it's just taxes, my salary, and enough for a new computer every few years. That's not my account and I never personally touch it.
My friend's family was like that growing up. Use it or lose it. From what I can tell he had a hard time growing out of it, but seems to be doing better now. He was already used to being poor, but raising his own family was a new level of awareness and probably his "lightbulb moment". Finding a decent job certainly helped, too.