That's a great point about the myth of "saving" money you wouldn't have spent anyway. (I saved $70,000 this month by not buying a luxury car!)

I do find it cool, though, to compare my budget from month to month. I can see that once we invested in a fancy espresso machine and started making coffee at home, our coffee expenses dropped by about $200/month. I feel like with that kind of evidence, I actually can justify saying we save that much each month. But without that data, it's just empty words.