How do you keep focused and motivated for your long term financial goals?

It's hard. No doubt about it. Feeding the neighbors dog while they go to Fiji or watching our cruddy old box TV after visiting someone with a 50" plasma really burnt sometimes. And then the neighbor on the other side gets a pool and we're like WTF we can't even afford curtains.

I think we got through it my telling ourselves that we can lash out later. We would have the occasional splurge but the more we got paid down, the less we wanted to lash out IYKWIM. When we finally cleared out personal and CC debt and just had the mortgage it felt brilliant

Astrid - I know how you feel. I'm planning on a few major things next year and I have to kick myself into gear getting budgeting stuff all organised. I'm trying to pay off a credit card, am about to look at the balance transfer offers of other banks to swap it to one with minimal interest on the transferred balance. I'm lucky I've only got one credit card and that currently is my only debt. But I do things like OS trips every year. I also want to have a bigger emergency fund/nest egg. I think the major thing for me is once this contract is over, I bite the bullet and temporarily go back to my skill-set work-wise and deal with the pressure and just think of 3-6 months of the money coming in to get me set.

I want to buy, but have no idea where or when, so have to start factoring in savings for that.