I think it depends on the person and the circumstance. I came into a good chunk of change for my age because of a very unordinairy reason (has nothing to do with my family or the lottery). The first few days after it happened, I was extremely paranoid and it took my a long time to accept what had happened. In the following year, learned a lot of hard lessons. One being that now that I'm debt free, it stresses me out way more to be in any amount of debt. Before, I had credit card debt and other things that had accumulated over time. I was in the mindset that taking on additional debt wasn't such a big deal. Now that I'm able to pay off my debt, I stress a lot more about paying that debt as soon as possible to stay out of debt.

My cost of living has gone down because I'm not paying interest on that debt. But now that I've put the money that I've had into assets, all I see are the bills that come in. I guess once you're past a certain point in debt, the monetary amount doesn't matter as much. But when it's manageable, it becomes a lot more important.