Only for people who buy new cars (something I’ve never done and never would)
Who does that?
Do we? Not me!
Not the impression I had when I had a TT - buy one, and then every 3 years or so have to pay over the odds for a replacement stylus because you effectively have to buy a refurbished cartridge - that is not rental!
There’s always one!
Yes, current credit scoring systems are odd.
For example one credit report of mine gives positive comments for not using much of my available credit card borrowing capacity overall but in another section it gives negatives as I am over 50% on a couple of cards - the ‘computer’ seems to take little account that these are long-term 0% deals which had a tiny transfer fee to begin with making them a more competitive form of borrowing than most loans for example. Weird.
Or consider them consumables?
Don’t feel guilty I’m sure a lot of people have, if the repayments are within your budget and you’ve managed to get a good deal on your interest rates and your hi fi who cares.
Back in the early days there’s no way I could have paid cash and without the help of my dealer I’d still be listening to a much less enjoyable system.
Looking back I would have saved cash getting right to the top with a loan rather than climbing the ladder when finance allows you too. It’s a cost selling products many times too. I have lots of headroom for a loan but to save up take time and time is expensive I’ve learned and something I prioritise (was really sick 5 years back). There’s no one rule on this of course since all our lives are different but I find it interesting that some things in life is claimed as OK for bank loan and some don’t and the judging comes a lot from history way back in how mothers and fathers raised us. In the new world of economy I’m not so sure those rules apply in the same way though. I have my car on leasing for example. No problems paying such. But spending that amount of cash would never in my life have been possible. I don’t see anything wrong in doing so really.
Its all about your attitude to debt. I have a buddy who says ‘well if they are dumb enough to lend it to me, then they cant expect to get it back!’
Or take the uk debt, where we measure success as reducing the rate of debt growth rather than paying it back!
Or landlords with interest only mortgages and no intention of ever paying off the mortgage
I think landlirds with interest only mortgages still have to pay it back. 
That is so completely different from borrowing to buy luxury items like hifi as in effect it is a business loan, with nothing personal about it: borrow money and start a business, the difference between income (rent net of costs) and finance interest being profit. (Unfortunately this practice in UK was contributory to house price inflation, while, sadly, all too many rented properties have been poorly maintained to the detriment of tenants paying for people’s lifestyles getting the rent as income.)
It is probably profitable because a significant proportion of buyers borrow the money then they forget to pay it off or their circumstances change and they cannot pay it off.
Maybe…they may die of old age 1st! More likely use the equity to finance another house 
I know a landlord, buys lots of properties with freeholds less than 60 years, as he says what does he care he will be dead by the time they run out!
Not the place to get in to this. I am a landlord. Don’t make assumptions based on the popular press or on your one case example. ( I unlike your friend, have just paid out for considerable extensions to leases for the long term)
Hes actually a great landlord and really looks after his Tennant’s…i never insinuated otherwise although others have made that assumption. He just has an innovative approach to debt management.
With you there , remember Dad saying if you aint got the money wait til you have!!
Trying to make overall system sense of contemporary debt structures is an interesting sport.
E.g. in the GFC lots of agents got paid for selling ‘Ninja’ mortgages that made no sense.
Those debts then also made chains of other financial traders and managers money as they were sliced and diced and sold on in incomprehensible packages.
At the end of the chain there were financial traders taking on vast sums of debt that they could not pay back when required to do so, which is why AIG and other financial institutions had to be bailed out for billions of dollars of public money (or allowed to go bust).
Agree these NINJA status mortgages (primarily in the US) made the UK definition of non-status mortgages look highly conservative. It was potty and then some, and these types of so-called ‘financial product’ always appear in rising markets, borne of greed and hubris by lenders, and the ability to ‘sell-on’ the underwriting/book carry risks.
Sadly, as you allude, a pile of dung piled higher, is just a larger pile of dung BUT, wait a moment, and the so-called specialist ratings agencies (partly employing ‘Monte Carlo theory’), which many 3rd party buyers of said (often sliced & diced) dung heaps relied upon to do their credit assessment (e.g. many pension, investment funds et al), ran the logic that not all the dung could go super-smelly at the same time i.e. there was benefit from having a huge pile and spread of same. Unbelievable to most, and a theory which survives no macro interrogation e.g. a sharply reversing housing market.
Put another way, if you’re gonna do ‘boom & bust’, do it in style and without logic. All emperor’s new clothes stuff.
When greed dominates it has a very corrosive impact even on the most well intentioned things.
I buy everything outright/upfront these days, including cars - I think I get better deals this way. It helps that I genuinely don’t desire the biggest, bestest of everything. I don’t have a ‘want list’ of things that I can’t afford, ok, except maybe a nice big detached house in Hampshire
I would never take out a loan for a HiFi, absolutely not. If I haven’t got the funds spare, then I don’t buy it. HiFi is not a must-have item and I certainly wouldn’t put myself into debt to have it
These credit scores are a mystery to me - assuming I have one, I honestly have no idea what my score might be, nor do I care…