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Bankrate: How do you save up for big purchases like that?

Megan: We use the envelope system. My husband and I just recently got good with budgeting. It took months for us to learn to do, but we budget every paycheck. We're in the process of saving for a house so we use the same system there.

First of all, for any big purchase we do not touch the plastic. Absolutely not, because you pay more than you ever would have dreamed. If somebody put that price tag on a couch of what you will actually pay, you would have never bought it, so we just go ahead and budget in how much we need to save.

For instance my husband wanted an iPod. Well, it took him three months of working to save up for it. But at $20 a week, that kind of thing, he wasn't allowed to have it until the envelope was full of the money that we needed.

Really sticking to a budget is how the big purchases happen. It is hard and you have to be really disciplined, but we found that since we've been disciplined with our money and can account for where every dollar goes, we don't have any more money fights.

We do have our stupid money, which is maybe $20 every two weeks, which is for the cup of coffee or the bagel when you drive past Dunkin' Donuts. We put that in the mix as well, but we find that the envelope system works great when we just take it out of the paycheck and account for everything that needs to be paid, what's going in to the savings envelope, what's going into the vacation envelope, so that we can reach the goals that we have.

Bankrate: What made you start budgeting?

Megan: We were coming to the end of the month, every month, and saying, oh my God, we don't have money for rent, we don't have money for this or that. We don't have money for Christmas.

Well guess what, Christmas comes the same time every year. It was no surprise that it was coming. This year we started in August using the envelope system for the holidays, saving a little from every paycheck.

But, now to make up for that, our food fund went down $10. Our budget is $70 and that's it. We make it a point to not use the debit or credit card because we will survive. Even if it is a rough week and we have to eat some ramen noodles or peanut butter and jelly, we'll survive it.

Bankrate: Were you always so smart with money?

Megan: No, definitely, this is a very recent thing for us -- I'm 23 and my husband is 26 years old. The first two years we lived together, everything went on plastic, everything. We had no concept. No one had ever explained them to us. All my mom said was, "You get one and I'll kill you." And that was it.

My husband had a car accident and my family wondered why we couldn't just get a loan and buy a car. My credit score was about 400-something. The bills just weren't being paid. It was always a question of paying the electric bill or paying the credit card bills, so then my stepfather sat us down and set up the envelope system and told us we need to have an emergency fund and budget and to do these things.

We've even since then started taking the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace course and it's amazing because I'm going, "My stepdad had all this stuff!" But it's an excellent system for anyone who wants to take control of their finances. So, we were in debt but we got ourselves out of $7,000 credit card debt over the past few years. It was a lot of work and took a lot of discipline, but we'd rather do it and get out of it now.