Sadie Morris has this post at the Personal Finance Advice blog: A life without debt – the big payoff.

A snippet:

When we first got married, our apartment was a tiny one bedroom with no furniture except a bedroom group purchased at a yard sale. The cars were clunkers that ran but did nothing to improve the beauty of the neighborhood. We both worked and lived on only one salary. We banked all of the second salary. As time went on, we were able to buy some furniture, move up to a two bedroom apartment and upgrade our lives as our salaries increased. Still, we banked one whole salary. Before long we had enough to buy our house with fifty percent down. The rest was financed on a short term loan that was paid off well before the due date.

Because we aggressively saved and invested money in those early years and avoided any debt, we only “suffered” for about five years. After that, we were comfortable and were able to do some fun things like travel and buy better (but still used) cars with cash.