Fiances Denise Raines and Joseph Antosh are on a very tight budget.  They buy the least expensive groceries, they’ve dropped gym memberships, stopped going out to movies, dining out and still regularly try to find other things they can live without, in order to save much needed cash just to pay the basic bills.

Like many Americans, Antosh, a carpenter, was laid off last year and Raines, a real estate agent, saw sales drop dramatically.  Also like many Americans, they lived paycheck to paycheck.  They didn’t have much in savings.

“At this stage in my life I never thought I’d be in this predicament, ever” says Antosh.  What little they had in the bank is now gone.

“I used to be able to go out and shop and spend and not have to think about it, and now there’s nothing but thinking about it, says Raines.  ”You just never realize how much you actually spend until you really sit down and look at it.  That’s what we did.  We went through all of our bank statements and realized how much money we were spending on things we really didn’t need”.

“Americans haven’t been great savers, we’re better spenders than we are savers and our savings rate has steadily declined since the peak in the 1980’s” says Jack Ablin, executive vice president and chief investment officer of Harris Bank.   Its part of our culture to live on debt, Harris says, with mortgages and credit cards, there’s a lot of access to borrowed cash.  Many people easily slip into living beyond their means.

The U.S. Commerce Department, which tries to track people’s saving rates, list the average amount people save from their income at about 6%.  That’s slightly up from about 4% five years ago, but way down from the savings rates in the past.

Those most at risk right now; baby boomers.  The Employee Benefit Research Institute says about half of them don’t have enough saved to get them through retirement years.

“The baby boomers are kind of the ‘me-now, get-it-now’ generation and I think part of it is because we’ve had a fair amount of economic prosperity so we really haven’t had to salt away for a rainy day” says Ablin.

Many of those who do have spare money are hanging onto it, rather than investing it, for fear of needing quick cash down the road, says Charles Brown, of CB3 Financial Group. “Rather than investing in the market they’ll keep 3-5 months worth of salary in a nest egg account just to protect them, whereas 5 years ago they weren’t doing that”

And the outlook for 2011 isn’t so rosy either.  Brown says any savings accumulated so far may have to stretch a little longer, as the economy remains slow.  “I don’t see the foreclosures dropping in 2011, I don’t see the unemployment rate significantly dropping. Basically this is the year of the consumer to get their spending in check so where they can be positioned to be affluent in 2012 and 2013″.

Antosh and Raines say that although times are tough right now, having each other to depend on makes things a little easier.

They’ve learned valuable lessons about budgeting and saving for the future.  A future they plan to spend together.

Their wedding is scheduled for September.