What the experts say

Student loans for kindergarten?

Student loans aren’t just for college anymore, said AnnaMaria Andriotis in SmartMoney.com. With tuition rising at private schools across the country, “a growing number” of parents are applying for education loans even for kindergarten. Your Tuition Solution, a major K–12 lender, says it expects to fund $20 million in loans for the 2012–13 school year. Much of the “demand is coming from high-income families” facing the rising cost of elite schools. The average cost of private-school tuition is now $22,000 a year, up 26 percent in the past six years alone. Bill Dunham, a construction project manager, has taken out loans to cover his son’s $10,000 annual tuition at a Boston high school, in the hopes that he’ll get into a good college. He plans to repay the debt over two years, but doing so means forgoing a college fund. “We’ll figure out how to pay for it then,” he says. “We’re hoping our experiment works.”

Paying for bad advice

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Your financial adviser has his best interests at heart, said Christopher Matthews in Time.com. You read that right. According to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, financial advisers are “more likely to give advice that will lead to higher fees for them than higher returns for their customers.” The authors sent hundreds of fake clients to banks and brokerages around Boston and found that advisers steered clients away from good investments in favor of “less productive ones” with fees. So is it time to dump your broker? Not quite. Remember that investors “are generally pretty bad at making rational investment decisions on their own, too.” Relying on an adviser with a self-serving strategy—and the accompanying fees—may still be better than letting your cash “sit idly in a bank account.”

A guide to housing’s rebound

If you want to know when your local housing market will improve, look at how foreclosures are handled in your state, said Karen Mracek in Kiplinger.com. In the 24 states that require a judge’s approval, the foreclosure backlog is 2.6 times larger than in states without judicial review. And in places where foreclosures are moving faster, housing prices are beginning to pick up. In Texas, where the average foreclosure takes 90 days, home prices climbed 1.2 percent at the end of last year. In New York, where the typical foreclosure takes a “whopping 1,019 days, prices fell 1 percent.”