I got mine at 24, I was lucky enough in the US we have a First Time Home Buyers loan which essentially trades the down payment for a bunch of smaller fees including mandatory inspections that must pass for the loan to approve, that totaled for me to about 1/5 of what a 20% down payment would be.

I have a core2duo laptop with 8 gb ram and an ssd (some custom parts) and do fine with basic c# development. I run both vs 2013 and 2010, again not doing anything graphic intensive, just some basic business front ends using winforms or sometimes wpf.