I think it totally depends on where you live in the country, your relationship status and your family background. I don’t think it’s as simple as making sensible choices.
If you’re in London, you’re going to be paying an average of about £900 per month just to rent a room in a house. In your 20s, when you’re building a career and probably only bringing home about £2000 per month after tax, that means you’re paying out half your income on rent. By the time you’ve paid for travel, food and student loan, you’ve got very little left and you’re lucky if you can save £100 per month.
For people in that situation you’re trapped in a cycle of never being able to get enough money together for a deposit to buy somewhere because your rent is too expensive, and so unless you meet someone and can pool cash to buy together or family help you to get a deposit, you are living month to month with very little left over to build a future with.
When I was in my twenties and renting in London on a teacher’s salary I had to be incredibly frugal to save £500 per month, and I thought that was good going. But it would have taken me about 20 years to get together a deposit at that rate and I did have some months where I thought what’s the point in me saying no to things and ordering the cheapest thing on the menu and always worrying about every penny if I’m never going to be able to buy somewhere to live anyway, unless I move away from all my family and friends (I’m a born and bred Londoner)? In my mid twenties I just thought fuck it and I spent a year’s worth of savings on travelling and I didn’t regret it for a minute. Life is for living and we can’t spend the best years of our lives sitting at home counting pennies. It’s such a waste of a life.
I think a lot of people who are smug about how well they’ve done due to all the sacrifices they’ve made often live in cheap areas and have been with their partner from a young age and so have benefited from a dual income and lower housing costs for most of their adult life. They have no idea how challenging it is for people who are single and/or who live in cities where rent eats up half your income and prevents you from being able to save. No amount of sacrifices would have saved me a house deposit on my salary with the rent I was paying every month. For a lot of people it’s genuinely impossible even if they stopped spending the £50-100 or so a month they spend on nails or avocado toast or whatever other ‘frivolous’ luxury people are criticised for spending their money on.
I’m in my late thirties now and most of my friends have mortgages, but only because they’ve left London. It’s not because they were savvy with money - it’s because they accepted they would have to live somewhere they don’t actually want to be if they wanted to afford a house. It’s also because they found partners and were able to combine incomes. They didn’t do anything other than move and meet someone. I have no idea if they use credit to buy things but I would imagine not - most of them are on very good incomes. All of us grew up being very wary about credit card debt as we had parents who had lived through the horrific interest rate rises in the 80s/90s.
I own a flat in London because I inherited a huge amount of money from a family member a few years ago which saved me from my never ending cycle of the monthly struggle to rent and live. I now have a fabulous lifestyle as all my income is pretty much disposable. And I have no debt. But that’s not because I was smart with money - it’s because I was lucky to have family money to fall back on.
Plenty of people are fully aware of the consequences of their financial choices, but faced with the reality of how limited their options are long-term on the wages they earn, I fully understand why people spend now and don’t worry about later, and I don’t judge them for it. We live in a very uncertain time and it can be difficult to see the value in sacrificing good times now for a future that might not come or look very different to the one our parents have had.