> I know folks who keep eating out, buying new vehicles, and even building new houses and I'm left scratching my head wondering how they afford all of this.
You can never judge people's financial situations from their spending habits.
Someone in my extended family spent years living large, buying new cars, building new houses, and wearing nice clothes. They had a family business and always said that the business wad doing well. Several years later the husband died unexpectedly. His wife was suddenly struggling to make ends meet, despite nothing actually changing with their "business".
As we later discovered, they were experts at amassing debt. The business wasn't really successful but they had used every possible angle to get more lines of credit, debt, "investments", and loans. They had even made a habit of "buying" supplies from vendors with Net 30 terms, reselling them, and then never paying the vendors back. They moved from state to state to scam new vendors every time they were blacklisted by the all of their local vendors.
That's an extreme example, but it highlights how appearances can differ so much from reality. More commonly, I think a lot of people just never learned how to save anything at all. I know an alarming number of people in their 30s who still haven't bothered saving anything more than the $1-10K they have in their checking account at a given time. When the number goes up, they spend it back down. You could have the same net income as these people but never achieve their level of lifestyle spending because you're doing some savings.
On the other end of the spectrum, many people are actually doing well. Wages are up (contrary to what you see on social media) and people's investments have done very well in recent years. Many of my friends are doing quite well for themselves by simply getting working a little harder to get jobs that pay a little above average and then carefully budgeting and investing over the long haul. Do this for a couple decades with some careful attention paid to where you live and the job you get and it's not hard to get a rather comfortable financial position by 40, especially in tech.