NEW YORK (Reuters) – While most kids are zoning out to Nickelodeon or playing video games on their parents’ iPhones, 13-year-old Jack James is busy creating multiple revenue streams for himself.

Back when he was nine, James got the idea to do the dirty work of taking his neighbors’ trash cans out for pickup, for a monthly subscription of $5. (He has since raised his rate to $10.) That work led to other gigs, like pet care and picking up mail when clients are away.

Now a wizened 13, the San Jose, California, resident has already penned a book about his entrepreneurial adventures: “How To Let Your Parents Raise a Millionaire.”

He’s not quite there yet, of course. The cool million is still elusive, but older teens could learn from his example. Instead of waiting for someone else to give you a job, you’d be wise to create your own.

“Find out what your community needs, make a flyer, and go do it,” James says in an interview, before heading off to school.

Adds his proud mom, Ann Morgan James: “Parents need to teach their kids they can be business owners, not just employees.”

Indeed, the rest of Jack James’ generation may not have much choice but to follow his lead. Unemployment among teens aged 16 through 19 who were looking for work was a whopping 24.9 percent in April, according to the latest data from the U.S. Labor Department.

NEW YORK, May 15 (Reuters) – Tracy Repchuk’s three children are still in grade school, but she’s already got college funding figured out. The Repchuk kids are 14, 15, and 16 and when they head off to college in a few years, here’s how much their parents will be chipping in: Zero.

Not because they are being punished for something: Tracy calls all three wonderful, outgoing and well-adjusted. And not because the family is strapped for cash: Tracy, 47, is an author and social media strategist, and her husband David Repchuk is a mobile solutions developer.

Instead, the financial tough love is simply the way the Burbank, California, resident was brought up, and she sees it as the best way to foster the self-reliance that will pay dividends for the rest of their lives.

“I’ve told my children that if they’re interested in college, it would be their responsibility to pay for it,” says Repchuk. “This wasn’t a surprise announcement, since I’ve felt this way forever. It’s their life, not mine.”

It may seem a tad harsh, but Repchuk certainly isn’t alone in letting children fend for themselves once they’re grown. According to a new study from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 62 percent of young adults (between the ages of 19 and 22) are getting some kind of financial help from their parents - which means 38 percent aren’t getting a dime.

Drill down further into the numbers, and just 35 percent of those kids ages 19-22 are getting tuition assistance. Sometimes that’s because parents don’t have any money to give, and sometimes it’s because their offspring are no longer in school by that point.

But other times, parents could potentially afford to help, but don’t. “We did three waves of interviews, ending in 2009,” says Patrick Wightman, the study’s lead author. “Over the course of the recession we saw even higher-income families cutting back on their financial support.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Talk to any American homeowner, and you’ll probably encounter some symptoms of chronic anxiety. Underwater mortgages, tanking house values and rampant foreclosures have shaken our psyches regarding the wisdom of property ownership.

But when it comes to real estate investment trusts (REITs) that invest in commercial property, they’ve been doing quite nicely, thank you very much. In fact if you invested in Vanguard’s REIT Index ETF during the lows of March 2009, you would have tripled your money since.

Of course REITs come in many flavors; they fill their portfolios with everything from office buildings to malls to hotels to mortgages. Looking at the sector’s fundamentals – low interest rates for REITs that are borrowing to fund projects, paired with rising rents and a recovering economy – some analysts expect the happy days to continue for a while.

“I think investors will be surprised by the fundamental improvements going on in REIT portfolios,” says Wilson Magee, director of global REITs for New York City-based investment managers Franklin Templeton Real Asset Advisors. “The simple fact is that virtually no construction has been going on, and no new supply is being added. That makes for a long-term trend of powerful earnings growth.”

That’s enough to make some investors, like Jacob Frydman, a New York City real-estate veteran, lick their chops. He recently formed United Realty Partners, a new real estate investment company, with fellow investor Eli Verschleiser. He cites a “perfect storm” of positive factors for REITs – low borrowing rates, slipping vacancy rates and climbing rents. In fact, office rents are projected to rise 1.9 percent this year, according to the Commercial Real Estate Market Survey of the National Association of Realtors.

“Buildings are now available significantly below their replacement cost, and at a substantial discount to three years ago,” says Frydman. “Also a lot of debt that originated five years ago is now coming due, and won’t be able to be refinanced. You’re going to see some great opportunities to buy.”

Of course, the rosy scenario is not without its risks. Mortgage REITs that invest in loans instead of property can be especially buffeted by the volatility in their underlying securities. And some commercial REITs are weighed down by portfolios of pricey properties acquired during the pre-bust years of 2006 or 2007. In fact, delinquencies for office and retail loans recently hit their highest-ever levels, according to Fitch Ratings.

NEW YORK, May 4 (Reuters) – Talk to any American homeowner, and you’ll probably encounter some symptoms of chronic anxiety. Underwater mortgages, tanking house values and rampant foreclosures have shaken our psyches regarding the wisdom of property ownership.

But when it comes to real estate investment trusts (REITs) that invest in commercial property, they’ve been doing quite nicely, thank you very much. In fact if you invested in Vanguard’s REIT Index ETF during the lows of March 2009, you would have tripled your money since.

Of course REITs come in many flavors; they fill their portfolios with everything from office buildings to malls to hotels to mortgages. Looking at the sector’s fundamentals – low interest rates for REITs that are borrowing to fund projects, paired with rising rents and a recovering economy – some analysts expect the happy days to continue for a while.

“I think investors will be surprised by the fundamental improvements going on in REIT portfolios,” says Wilson Magee, director of global REITs for New York City-based investment managers Franklin Templeton Real Asset Advisors. “The simple fact is that virtually no construction has been going on, and no new supply is being added. That makes for a long-term trend of powerful earnings growth.”

That’s enough to make some investors, like Jacob Frydman, a New York City real-estate veteran, lick their chops. He recently formed United Realty Partners, a new real estate investment company, with fellow investor Eli Verschleiser. He cites a “perfect storm” of positive factors for REITs – low borrowing rates, slipping vacancy rates and climbing rents. In fact, office rents are projected to rise 1.9 percent this year, according to the Commercial Real Estate Market Survey of the National Association of Realtors.

“Buildings are now available significantly below their replacement cost, and at a substantial discount to three years ago,” says Frydman. “Also a lot of debt that originated five years ago is now coming due, and won’t be able to be refinanced. You’re going to see some great opportunities to buy.”

Of course, the rosy scenario is not without its risks. Mortgage REITs that invest in loans instead of property can be especially buffeted by the volatility in their underlying securities. And some commercial REITs are weighed down by portfolios of pricey properties acquired during the pre-bust years of 2006 or 2007. In fact, delinquencies for office and retail loans recently hit their highest-ever levels, according to Fitch Ratings.

NEW YORK, May 3 (Reuters) – Whenever Manhattan attorney Ted Scofield gets offered equity in a start-up, he feels like he’s been thrown into the middle of a high-stakes Las Vegas poker game.

If he bets right, he could hit a flush and become richer than he ever dreamed. If he bets wrong, he could end up with nothing.

“It’s a real balancing act,” says Scofield, a securities lawyer who helps entrepreneurs and small businesses get started. “At that stage they can’t always afford to pay me for my advice, so I have to get out my crystal ball and decide if taking stock is going to pay off.”

The shares-versus-dollars decision presents a common dilemma for start-up staffers and consultants. Early-stage companies often don’t have the ready money to just write a check, so they have to lure talent with the promise of stock.

Indeed, over the course of the Great Recession, more private firms turned to equity as a compensation option. In 2007, about 35 percent of private companies were using long-term incentives like stock awards; by 2011 that had risen to 61 percent, according to a survey by the human resources association WorldAtWork and Vivient Consulting.

Stock compensation has become so prevalent that Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently rolled out an equity compensation award analysis tool for its high net worth clients.

PROSPECTS OF A $200-MILLION PAY-OFF

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Considering how often Marjorie Asturias’s credit card charges have been denied recently, you’d think she was a notorious scammer, or an international art thief.

“We have plenty of credit on the card, and faithfully pay our balance in full each month,” says Asturias, 40, a Dallas, Texas resident with a penchant for books, gardening and her three dogs. “But suddenly, we’re getting a number of charges denied, sometimes while we’re standing at the register.”

“Before, this happened only a handful of times in the 10-plus years we’ve had the card,” says Astorias, who is president of digital marketer, Blue Volcano Media.

Asturias isn’t alone in feeling singled out by her bank for credit-card charge rejection. But it’s not malicious; financial institutions are feeling the pressure of keeping up with armies of hackers who steal personal information, swipe card numbers and load those accounts with false charges.

Total global fraud losses from credit and debit cards amounted to $7.6 billion in 2010, up 10 percent over the previous year, according to trade publication The Nilson Report. Of that, 47 percent was in the United States.

Data on the precise number of charge denials isn’t publicly available, as the banks consider it proprietary information.

And credit card companies like Visa say authorization decisions are made by the issuing bank, not them.

NEW YORK, April 26 (Reuters) – Considering how often Marjorie Asturias’s credit card charges have been denied recently, you’d think she was a notorious scammer, or an international art thief.

“We have plenty of credit on the card, and faithfully pay our balance in full each month,” says Asturias, 40, a Dallas, Texas resident with a penchant for books, gardening and her three dogs. “But suddenly, we’re getting a number of charges denied, sometimes while we’re standing at the register.”

“Before, this happened only a handful of times in the 10-plus years we’ve had the card,” says Astorias, who is president of digital marketer, Blue Volcano Media.

Asturias isn’t alone in feeling singled out by her bank for credit-card charge rejection. But it’s not malicious; financial institutions are feeling the pressure of keeping up with armies of hackers who steal personal information, swipe card numbers and load those accounts with false charges.

Total global fraud losses from credit and debit cards amounted to $7.6 billion in 2010, up 10 percent over the previous year, according to trade publication The Nilson Report. Of that, 47 percent was in the United States.

Data on the precise number of charge denials isn’t publicly available, as the banks consider it proprietary information.

And credit card companies like Visa say authorization decisions are made by the issuing bank, not them.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Once the domain of grandmothers waiting for a quarterly check from their local utility, dividends have become very appealing in the wake of a choppy decade for stock markets.

Dividend-paying stocks reward investors whether the market goes up or down, a fact which boosted their popularity in 2011. Equity-income funds were the top diversified equity performers in 2011, up almost three percent for the year, according to fund research firm Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company.

But that popularity, ironically, could also be a problem.

“Dividend stocks have had a great run,” says Charlie Dreifus, senior portfolio manager of New York City-based The Royce Funds. “Has it become a crowded and overvalued space? Maybe.”

Companies jumping on the dividend bandwagon include Apple Inc, which, after years of rebuffing income-hungry shareholders, said recently it will award a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share beginning in July.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc recently hiked its dividend for the first time in six years, by almost a third, making for a yield of roughly 1.6 percent.

Other dividend stalwarts offer even higher yields – like Merck at 4.3 percent; Kraft Foods Inc, at 3 percent; and Boeing Co at 2.4 percent.

NEW YORK, April 17 (Reuters) – Annabel Adams has seen a lot in her life: 9-11, the dot-com bust, the housing collapse, the financial crisis, the Great Recession.

That may sound like a lifetime of experience, but she is just 28 years old.

If your birth year is essentially a genetic lottery, which drops you into the economic circumstances of the day, then it’s no exaggeration to say that the 70 million millennials – or Generation Y, those born in the 1980s and ’90s – appear to have lost that lottery.

“We grew up believing that we would have all the things our parents had: With a college education we’d get a dream job, health insurance, a 401(k), a home,” said Adams, a Long Beach, California, resident and public relations manager for a healthy-eating firm. “Now nothing is sure anymore.”

As a result, Adams has shelved a lot of those expectations. She lives at home with her mom, does not have a 401(k), and is coping with $20,000 in student loans. While she enjoys carving out a niche as a health writer, the prospect of becoming a homeowner seems distant.

Much has been made of the millennials as an entitled generation, constantly whining about the obligations of adulthood while fiddling with their iPhones. But life has been tough for many of them.

Student debt has now surpassed $1 trillion, with the average college grad who took out loans saddled with more than $25,000 in debt. Americans aged 20 to 24 now face 13.2 percent unemployment, up from 7.7 percent five years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – For young would-be homebuyers, this really is the best of times and the worst of times.

After the brutal housing bust, homes are more affordable now than they have been in more than four decades, according to the National Association of Realtors. Home prices have sunk to 2002 levels, and interest rates hover near historic lows – below 4 percent for 30-year fixed-rate loans.

The NAR says its Housing Affordability Index – which measures median salaries against home prices and mortgage rates – is at a record high, and that means this can be an ideal time to buy a first home.

On the other hand, young Americans aren’t exactly flush with cash. Almost one in five young adults is jobless, fresh college graduates now carry, on average, more than $25,000 in debt, and many starter jobs pay poorly and are hard to find.

Meanwhile, mortgage shoppers are expected to come up with more and more cash to mollify nervous lenders: Median down payments last year were around 22 percent, according to online real estate marketplace Zillow, roughly double the rate of three years earlier.

So how can first-time homebuyers cobble together the money to get a deal on a dream home? They can apply for assistance to the Bank of Mom and Dad.

That’s how newlyweds Mike and Jessica Sental landed a new home in Clifton, New Jersey, last summer. The couple was house hunting but having trouble coming up with enough for the down payment. They had about $30,000 stashed away, roughly 10 percent of the purchase price, but needed a little more to appease lenders.