... I've never lived beyond my means at all[/U], but in my 20's I thought I needed a BMW, designer clothes, vacations at trendy resorts, etc. and had little savings to show for it early on...
Again, I'm just surprised that most everyone has been LBYM throughout their lives. Demonstrates more than ever to me how unusual (in a good way) this group is compared to the general population. Also tells me that polls here are certainly not representative of the general population...
I still remember in my early 20s telling myself that when I got a full-time job out of school that I would get myself a BMW. Not a 320, but a "real" one. A 733! Then, when I got that first good-paying job, I was also married and with a mortgage to pay. That 733 cost more than one year of my salary then. The lust for fancy cars quickly faded. Soon, I found myself buying an old full-size Ford pickup as a spare car, just so that I could haul landscaping material for our new home.
Recently, we went to a Honda dealer to help my daughter with her buying a car. Seeing all these new shiny cars in the showroom does not excite me at all.
... My family is pretty frugal, so for them to make fun of me, I must have been pretty tight fisted with my money!
I am more frugal than my two younger brothers. Being older and further along in my career, in 1987 when I bought the house I still live in, it was the largest in our family. My brothers have since both "upgraded" and now live in nicer homes than mine. They had to keep up with their friends, and I felt no such need.
My mother once told my brothers that she couldn't see how I still had my old 27" TV and not threw it out. I simply did not see what was wrong with that TV, but wondered what I was missing, so we went out and bought the first HDTV in our family. This was in 2001.
The novelty soon wore off; the HDTV did not make lousy programs any better. All members of my extended family now have better HDTVs than I have, simply because they bought later and even paid much less than I did. My 42" still works, and I see no needs to replace it. Even that old 27" CRT was not thrown out. It was brought up to my boonies home, where we watch TV even less than when at our main home.
... As a kid, I avidly read Disney comic books that I inherited from my dad and my favorite character was... Scrooge McDuck. I always wanted to take a dip in a pool of gold coins
There were Disney comics in French. Did you read these or in English?
I wonder if they were as popular with French kids as the Franco-Belgian comic like Tintin, Spirou, Lucky Luke, Schtroumpfs (Smurfs), Johan et Pirlouit, and Asterix, etc...