Didn't read the thread.. Just read the OP. Here's my response:
Just stop impulsively buying things. Set a budget for how much you can spend on food, and spend only that. Never eat out. Never spend money on a credit card you don't intend to pay off immediately (i.e. use credit cards only as a quick means to pay for something using money you already have, not as an actual line of credit).
It's not hard, but it is simple. After losing my job in 2009, spending too many months unemployed and looking for work, and now having worked a low pay job for a year, I've gotta say that it became easy to do the above because of the stress of spending.
A simple tool to use to put stuff away into savings, if your job has it, is direct deposit. Get your place of employment to deposit a set % of every paycheck into your savings.
It's not easy depending on how compulsively you spend, but it is simple. There are no easy solutions, and the simplest but hard solutions to hard problems are often the only ones that will work.
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