For me, learning to do decent landings has saved me LOTS of $$$$. Not that my landings are perfect, however I rarely put a plane in because of messing up on approach or just losing it and not being swift enought to make a landing with limited time. I generally can take the time needed to fly ahead of the plane now and get it to the ground. Of course, there are those times that no matter how good you are, you may still lose one if the problem occur at the wrong time or you simple do not have control at all.

I was flying my 30cc Edge the other day and an aileron servo failed at a very bad time. Somehow I got the plane out of the very low alitude situation without being nervous and managed to get her down with a safe landing. A couple years ago that would have NEVER happened and my plane would have been toast. All those hundreds of repetitive landing circuits from right to left and left to right have paid some dividends now.