Highly educated, sometimes entitled and incredibly humbled by the current labor market, Generation Y is hungry for work. But do employers understand this enormous and grossly underemployed demographic?

Nearly eighty million strong, Gen Y is loosely defined as those born between 1980 and 1994 (or 2005 depending on who you talk to). Raised in a kid-centric time, many continue to be coddled by helicopter parents not willing to wean their precious lot from the proverbial financial teat. As a result, Gen Y’s expectations of the workforce are vastly different from baby boomers and even the closely-related Generation X.

“I told you so.”

Those are the four words no spouse wants to hear from their partner, especially when it comes to investing and retirement planning.

Just ask Dr. David Rothberg. Rothberg, 59, and his wife heavily invested in tech giant Cisco way back in the mid-1990s. She wanted to shift money into bonds instead. But that’s not Rothberg’s style: “I’m an aggressive investor, and the market was going up 30 percentage points per year, so why would I invest in something that would get us six percent?”

Weathering the storm has lost popularity points with investors in the latest round of market volatility, prompting some to wonder if panic and irrationality are the name of the new game.

Investors pulled $31.3 billion out of U.S. equity funds in the two weeks ending August 10, reaching outflow levels not seen since the stock market collapse of March 2009.

Ten years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find philanthropy specialists in most private banking and investment firms.  But today, philanthropic services are a major division of most wealth management operations, offering clients a myriad of investment vehicles and services to do good.

“It was an add-on before, something extra that they did to be kind or nice, but I think it’s now a business magnet for dealing with all different parts of an individual’s wealth,” says Eileen Heisman, CEO and President, National Philanthropic Trust.

In 2008, Ron DeFore had dreams of putting his 3,000-square-foot basement to good use — think swank home theater system, game room, a couple of extra bedrooms — but then the global financial system went to hell in a handbasket.

“I haven’t thought of doing that [renovation] since 2008 for financial reasons,” says DeFore. Between 2001 and 2004, DeFore sunk roughly $500,000 into his 11,000-square-foot, Washington-area home, which he purchased for $1.1 million 10 years ago.