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Last year, I signed up for a program called “Connections” through my college alma mater. The program is designed to bring a group of the college’s current juniors and seniors to the big city, for a pow-wow with both recent graduates and ancient grads like myself, who work in the students’ prospective career fields.

On the day of the confab, a handful of us alumni sat on the dais, facing a dozen fresh-faced undergrads. After we alums painted a verbal picture for the kids of the work world we inhabit on a daily basis, it was time for the question-and-answer session. It took a while, but then one coed held up her hand and asked, “What do you wish you knew when you were our age that you know now?”

It was the question I’d waited for, the one that allowed me to make what I hoped would be a significant contribution to the collective joy of the student group, not then but approximately four to five decades into the future.

This post comes from Mike Nickele at our partner site Zing!

I’ve got some good news and some bad news on the housing front. First, the good news: The market is ticking up and the inventory of foreclosed homes is dwindling. The bad news: For just that reason, Fannie Mae is ending its HomePath program.

Fannie Mae’s HomePath program helps buyers of foreclosed properties get cost-effective mortgages, including cash for repairs and remodeling on homes owned by Fannie Mae. The HomePath program currently offers a number of incentives for home buyers: You can put down as little as 5%, there’s no mortgage insurance requirement, and you don’t have to get an appraisal.

They say there are many paths to financial success, but if you accept the idea that these are two-way streets, that means there are also many paths to financial ruin.

Maybe my view is skewed by the fact that people tend to come to me for financial advice once they are already in serious trouble. Then again, my interactions may just be representative of the national condition. A recent study by the Urban Institute estimated that some 77 million Americans have outstanding debt which has been reported to a collection agency, with an average amount owed of $5,200.

That amount owed isn’t even the real problem. The real problem is that if they are not keeping up with their bills, these people almost certainly are not saving enough for retirement. That will lead to even bigger problems later on.

These days, there’s a lot of attention being focused on the subject of bullying. This emphasis is well justified. The whole bullying experience tends to be destructive and wreak long-term consequences. As one who was, at times, both bullied and a bully as a kid, I can testify that while I have almost repressed the former experience, I’ll never be able to live down the latter. I join the chorus of those arguing the more we can reduce bullying, the better off society will be.

It’s fitting, too, that we are finally getting around to acknowledging there is such a thing as financial bullying, just a couple eons after the first spouse was castigated for shelling out too many beaver pelts for a bushel of corn.