As long as you're young and healthy, you're golden.

My husband and I make six figures, we're older, in our fifties. He's starting to have some health problems and because of that we didn't take a vacation last year. Our insurance covered a lot, but we still had to come up with a few extra thousand to cover the rest.

When we do take a vacation it's usually for one week, period. No longer. There was one time we took a three week tour in Europe in 2000, and were STUNNED to learn everyone else got so much more paid vacation than we did. If we take any more time off during the year than a week, we stay home because we can't really afford to travel.

We've also been in our house for almost 20 years now, and we don't have savings to cover the repairs and upgrades it needs. We're waiting five more years until it's paid off before we can replace the back deck and update the bathrooms & kitchen. In the mean time, I'm just crossing my fingers neither one of us gets cancer.

We do have retirement funds, but we'd be heavily penalized in taxes if we tried to access that money before age 59.5.