Describe something you saved money for

I'll describe saving up for a trip to Japan, which took me the better part of a year and involved a level of discipline I don't think I'd shown about money before or since. It started as a fairly vague idea after a friend showed me photos from her own trip, and it gradually turned into an actual plan once I worked out roughly what it would cost including flights, accommodation, and enough spare money to not spend the whole time worrying about every meal. I saved by doing the slightly boring but effective thing of setting up an automatic transfer the day after payday, before I had the chance to spend it on anything else, and I cut back on the small recurring costs that add up without you noticing — takeaway coffee, mostly, and a subscription or two I wasn't really using. It took about eleven months in total, which felt painfully slow around month four or five when the target amount still looked impossibly far away. Was it worth it — completely, without hesitation. I went for three weeks in the end, and there's a particular memory of standing in a quiet garden in Kyoto early one morning, completely alone, that I still think about regularly, long after the money itself has been forgotten. I think that's generally true of saving for an experience rather than an object — the money disappears either way, but the memory from the trip has stayed vivid in a way I doubt a purchased object ever would have.