Hmmmm. That is a good question and I think my answer is pretty much the same as all of yours. We cook from scratch pretty much every meal. Very rarely go out to eat. No cable bill etc. I think what people fail to realize is that ‘going without’ is a mindset. Being willing to deny yourself the ‘wants’ and sort priorities for what the real ‘needs’ are.
If you go long enough without you realize the needs list is pretty small. You ‘make due’ with what you have, you remove the ‘habit’ of always buying (let alone buying new things), you fix or repair and/or make those new things when needed (even if it means an invention of sorts) to get you by. To run to a store is rarely the first thing on my mind when i ‘need’ something………..of course having the nearest store of any type 25 miles away really helps to teach you this when you first start out ‘paring down’.
I now see it as more of a challenge than a choice to go without. How, what, where, when can I fix, replace, substitute something else to get done what needs done. And that really IS a mindset. 🙂