Life really turns on a few moments in time all told. For my wife and myself, STEM degrees with in-state tuition (I turned down a prestige private university) w

Life really turns on a few moments in time all told. For my wife and myself, STEM degrees with in-state tuition (I turned down a prestige private university) with automatic test-score-based scholarship went a long way for me and my wife. Ended up with $40k in debt total which was pretty easy to pay down in a couple years in industry. Parents haven't helped once financially past college (including home buying). They had some savings for me and sent some money for food. And they bought a new car and gifted us their '08 Civic upon graduation (still going strong!) More recently, we moved out of an expensive coastal city to a suburb of a smaller nearby city in the first summer of the pandemic. When mortgage rates were sub-3% (with 20% down) and before the housing market got crazy hot. That was just luck = preparation (saved money and built credit and no debt) meets opportunity (turns out our savings were enough for 20% down if we looked to the burbs and we could get a low rate and go under asking for a 3k sqft, newish house). That's the best financial decision we've made since our college decisions. It really is a combination of luck and a few consequential decisions. It helped that we were both pretty academically smart and lived in a state with great engineering and CS programs at in-state schools. But we haven't made 100s of savvy financial decisions with huge ROI. Just a few sensible ones and dodged some bullets such as private university, burdensome house, etc.