No more ready-made?

A decade or so ago, when she was a consumer columnist in Vancouver, New York-based businesswoman Mariana Gayle had a saying:"The most expensive thing you'll ever pay for is convenience."
"If you haven't noticed the flood waters of debt rising around your ankles, the person offering a cold splash of reality is Gail Vax-Oxlade, host of the Slice network's Til Debt Do Us Part."
"My philosophy is: You can have it all, you just can't have it all at the same time," the personal finance expert says. "And what we have been doing in the past is having it all at the same time."
I grew up with parents who did not have it all- we waited until there was money to pay for things. I did not know what scratch was until I was an adult. I thought that you bought it as an ingredient in the grocery store. Friends would brag that their mother had made a cake from scratch. Every week, my mother made a cake, often a bundt cake which I still love. Must make one again soon. Our cakes were always from scratch, I was the mixer. I have no problem looking at cake batter and deciding the more milk is needed or more flour.
I had second-hand clothes and never thought twice about it. We had wonderful food and my mother was a great cook, could knit up a storm, her sewing was great. We did not eat out very often at all- it was pie or cake on Sunday drive and that did not happen often.
We lived by Vax-Oxlade's rules: You cannot spend more than you make (this meant that our television was not fixed for a year when there was not enough money for the repair; your must save something- with three children that was hard for my parents and you have to get the debt paid off- and by "paid off" she means within three years, no matter what it takes to do it. Good rules to live by.