It's never enough.

You may feel the urge, but there's resisting it and putting yourself in debt because of it. I'm pretty good at resisting it, simply because I capped my credit card limit (no, don't raise it to try to get me to put myself into debt, you evil bank) and refuse to use it when I know I don't have the money in my bank account to back up the purchase. I'm going back to school this spring because I want to put my life on a better track, so any financial planning advice I offer is juvenile at best.

What I can say is avoid the damn credit card, be patient and work out a budget for what you can actually afford to spend. Welcome to learning how to use a spreadsheet. Then put that much (take it off your pay each month - immediately) in a savings account. Once it gets rolling it'll motivate you to keep going. I put $50 in my savings account every two weeks. By the time I use is (trip to iceland this coming August) it's going to be a nice amount.

Oh, and quit smoking. Run the numbers on that and it'll blow your mind.

Edit: You know the saying about how people work in bike shops to get deals on bikes, etc? Well, play that angle - never ever ever pay full price or even a regular sale price for something. You can do better. Be patient and wait for a ridiculous sale somewhere, race for a local shop and get a deal that way, if your work is something that could help the shop, set up a barter agreement, something, anything. Shops are (sometimes) run by perfectly normal people. In a lot of cases (I'm speaking from personal experience as a shop owner here) inventory is easier to give out than cash. We've bartered in the past with bikes/parts if someone we know offers a service we're interested in or if we seek them out.