How To Buy A House?

This was actually a message on my friend's MSN the other day. So I decide to PM him and talk to him about that as I know it is really hard to buy a house now. I can roughly give you the chat with him.

I told him that its hard to buy a house and we will have to start small maybe by buying an apartment(which is not cheap too). Then he ask me again how to buy a house. So I told him, work hard, do OT and keep that money for down payment and can use epf and safe as much as possible from salary.

But he told me that he does OT but don't get anything and ask me how to buy a house which I repeated what I said on top. But later he was angry as he was saying that houses 1 decade ago is just 40K. But guess what? 1 decade ago, food and everything was cheap and at 1 decade ago 40K is considered a lot of money too. Not only that, he started to blame human's for making it so expensive and that even the stock market which goes up and down is human's fault.

I guess now in depends on we as individual how we are going to earn and how we are going to buy a house, buy a car, get married and also to live a simple life or a life that is extremely good. I guess its how we will play our cards and we will need to play our cards nicely to make sure that we don't go into debt.