At the time I write this, the world is still in the aftermath of the credit crunch and many are still struggling. During the housing boom that preceded the crunch, a lot of people were borrowing far too much money to buy houses and then taking loans against their equity when house prices rose again. This money was spent on flash cars, exotic holidays, new gadgets, expensive furniture, and so on. People just out of college were living in bigger houses and driving newer cars than their parents, and thought this was the way of the world and the natural order of things, that the standard of living increased with every generation.
Post-crunch, this view flipped and a lot of people complained at length that the 'boomer' generation (born in the years immediately after WW2) had it easy and ruined the economy for everyone else. They pointed out things like inflation-adjusted salary comparisons and so on to argue that the standard of living had dropped. They rarely conceded that the boomer generation when young had smaller houses, no computers or consoles or washing machines, one car per household, one TV per household, and so on. They argued that people were 'forced' to live beyond their means in order to have a 'normal' standard of living.
If you were so inclined you could spend your whole life arguing about stuff like this. It isn't worth it. I want you to take from this a sense of perspective. When you move out of the family home, you should not expect to maintain your standard of living immediately. You shouldn't expect to move straight into a similar-sized house or drive a fancy car. Your mum and I bought our house at age 34, not at age 23. We both owned houses before buying this one. I had savings, your mum had equity from the housing boom of the early-2000s. We had a windfall earlier that year, which we saved instead of spending. We had no debt, and good credit ratings. A lot of things had to align for us to move here, it didn't just fall into our laps - and the ideal home won't just fall into yours. It takes time.
When I graduated, I lived in a shared ex-council-house in Crewe, with two strangers who relied on housing benefit for rent. One of them used to secretly pawn my N64 games to pay for tobacco. There was no upstairs bathroom. The power was on a meter, and every other month we either forgot or couldn't afford to top it up and had to sit there in darkness with no electricity until the corner shop opened. The kitchen was an unusable mess, so I used to eat crisps for breakfast and get takeaway doner meat and chips for dinner, every day.
When your mum got her first house, her neighbour was mentally unstable and used to put dogshit through people's letterboxes.
It sucks, but that's what you have to put up with when you're starting out.
When you get your first house, you will have less space than you are used to. You will have to put up with annoying neighbours and dickhead housemates. You will be less comfortable and have fewer amenities than you are used to. You will also have a great deal more freedom and fun than you have had before, and that will make up for it.
That's all OK, it's part of the process. Do not feel like your salary is inadequate, and do not feel like you ought to have all these fancy gadgets and must go into debt to get them. You cannot expect to have the same standard of living in your first year of work as people who have worked and saved and learned from their mistakes for 30 years or more - but you can get there as long as you don't bury yourself with debt to start with.
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