If the ease with which hackers pilfered the financial information of millions of Target and Neiman Marcus customers has you worried about how easily your private data can be lifted from your mortgage company, wait until you hear what a major cyber security firm found out about lenders.

Here's a hint: It isn't good.

According to HALOCK Security Labs, mortgage companies big and small allow information-sharing practices that put your personal and financial data at grave risk.

In its investigation of 63 lenders, the Schaumburg, Ill., firm discovered that seven out of 10 allowed applicants to send their info over unencrypted email as attachments. Moreover, nearly the same percentage encouraged faxing sensitive data, which is somewhat less dangerous but still not as secure as encryption.

Only 40 percent of the lenders studied offered a postal mail option, and just 12 percent provided a secure email portal.

Asked why a secure email portal was not offered, several lenders said it was a matter of convenience, or what the customer was "most comfortable with."

This comment from a survey respondent explains this insecure practice: "Oftentimes it was easier to have my clients send documents like W-2s through email because everyone has access to an email account. Most (lenders) don't want to take the time to explain what a secure portal is and how to use it. Everyone understands email."

Do you need to worry? Let Carlos Sa, head of information technology at the Mortgage Network, a lender with 40 offices on the East Coast, answer that question. He says he sees attacks on Mortgage Network's systems on a regular basis.

"It's not consistent," says Sa. "It comes in waves, but they're mostly very basic attacks."

A lot of those attempts, according to Mortgage Network President Brian Koss, are not aimed at his company in particular. Rather, he says, hackers "are randomly looking for anyone who has any kind of (financial) data."

Sa says that security keeps taking an increasing part of the budget at the company, just as it has at many others. "A bigger portion every year," he says.

Much of what's spent on security is used to set up firewalls, which can be used to prevent malicious information from making its way into the system and prevent specific information from leaking -- or being leeched -- out. But firewalls can't protect you or the system from malicious information attached to emails.

The Massachusetts-based company encrypts all its laptops before they are shipped to its loan officers. Encryption is an algorithm that turns the message into unreadable cipher text. It won't prevent hacking, but it reduces the likelihood that the hacker will be able to read the stolen data, rendering it useless.

Sa also tests the company's computer systems on a regular basis. "There's always something in our logs that is interesting and odd," he says. "People are trying any number of ways to hack our programs."

So how can you be sure your most personal financial information won't be snatched from your lender? Here are a few tips:

-- Brand awareness. If you are sending anything online, be sure you are dealing with brand names. Hackers follow the path of least resistence, and the big-name lenders tend to have the strongest security measures.

Also, the lender's security systems are only as good as those of its weakest contractor. And the big lenders tend to work with only the strongest vendors.

-- Look for e-signatures. If a company offers an electronic signature process, it shows a heightened level of security awareness and sophistication.

-- Avoid unencrypted email. Sending anything over the Internet invites trouble. But since regular emails can be hacked by anyone, use only password-encrypted email to send your information to your lender. "Common sense goes a long way," says Sa. "People are too comfortable with regular email."

Says security blogger Graham Cluley: "If (email) was invented today, no one would use it. It's worth the extra effort to go through the paces of using a secure portal."

-- Stay away from drop-boxes. Drop-box technologies are fine for most data exchanges, but you have no clue who has access. Keep your private stuff private using encrypted email.

-- HTTPs. When applying online or sending anything over the Internet, make sure the website itself is secure. Look to see if the URL begins with "https". And as you go from page to page, make sure the frame and URL have not changed. In other words, make sure the "s" is still there. Otherwise, you could become a victim of a phisher looking to steal your data.

Finally, there's this warning from Terry Kurzynski, a senior partner at HALOCK: "Any type of weak link in a system involving sensitive information exposes people to unnecessary risk. It takes months to recover from identify theft and minutes to log into a secure portal. Do the math."

House-hunters can find homes on their own. So can renters who are not quite ready to take the leap into home ownership. But do you really want to go it alone? Why not let an agent do the legwork for you?

Hiring an agent to help with your search for a rental apartment may be a big-city phenomenon, especially in places like New York and Chicago. But real estate agents everywhere can help renters find suitable accommodations just like they help buyers find houses.

And perhaps more importantly, they can make the search much easier.

To hear Lee Lin of RentHop.com tell it, using agents to find a rental -- a house in a nice neighborhood, perhaps, or an apartment close to work -- is becoming more common. There are any number of reasons for this, most of which ring true whether you are renting or buying.

"The main reason to use any real estate professional is to save time and utilize an expert's knowledge of the market that can take decades to build," says Lin, co-founder and CEO of RentHop. The site sorts apartment listings in the New York City, Boston and Chicago areas by any number of variables, including location, doorman and elevator.

"The best deals change daily, and market trends can be highly localized to specific neighborhoods or even streets within the same city. And every case still requires a scheduled physical inspection of the premises."

While it's a given that agents can relieve you from a lot of legwork, they also bring other benefits to the search. Often, for example, a trusted agent develops a personal relationship with a particular landlord or staff member. And as such, he or she may learn about upcoming availabilities before they are officially listed.

Good deals are hard to find for people who spend a few weekends a year looking for an apartment or house. But agents are in the trenches every day, all year long, previewing this place and that. They know who's willing to negotiate, for example -- and not just on the rent, but on other lease terms such as the security deposit.

Some landlords prefer to deal with agents or would-be tenants who come through an agent. That way, the landlord doesn't have to do as much of the paperwork or screening. And with vacancies falling practically everywhere, competition is fierce for decent places, so it helps to have professional representation.

Moreover, according to Lin, many landlords are still low-tech. There is no universal database of rental listings in any city, he says.

"Even today, the industry still relies on spreadsheets and faxes to transmit listings to brokers and listing directories. Newer sites like RentHop allow consumers access to direct aggregations from many landlords, but there are always some listings that slip through the cracks."

Still, not every real estate agent wants to work with renters, and not all of those who do are experts in the field. Some will want to push you into a place as quickly as possible and collect their commission. So look for an agent who specializes in rentals, or who specializes in properties in the particular neighborhood or community where you'd most like to live.

Another way to find a good rental agent is to ask if the brokerage has a corporate relocation department. Often when companies are moving their employees about, people, especially those whose job shifts are temporary, prefer to rent rather than buy. So a relo agent needs to have his or her fingers on the pulse of the rental market as well as the purchase market.

Rob Weiss, director of business development at RentHop, also suggests asking landlords or property managers to suggest a decent agent. They know the good ones and can help point you in that direction, or at least give you a running start.

In addition, some websites screen agents and landlords, scoring everyone in the system on variables such as how quickly they respond and how well they close deals.

In many cases, the landlord will pay your agent's commission, or at least a finder's fee. But how much the landlord is willing to shoulder and how much you'll have to kick in is open to negotiation. Whatever the cost, though, it may be worth it if the agent has helped you find a great place with little or no effort on your part.

It is well understood that many young adults have yet to leave the nest, a phenomenon that has helped suppress demand for first-time housing. But a new analysis shows just how powerful the stay-at-home trend has been.

According to the most recent Census Bureau figures, one in three young adults ages 18 to 34 lived in their parents' or in-laws' homes in 2012. By comparison, only one in four young adults lived with their parents in the decade between 1990 and 2000.

People in this age cohort typically represent half of all rookie homebuyers, says Natalia Siniavskaia, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders, and their delayed willingness -- or ability -- to strike out on their own has helped drive down the new house market.

The largest shift in living preferences occurred after 2005, especially among those young adults ages 25 to 34. Between 1990 and 2005, the share living with parents was about 12 percent, but it rose to more than 19 percent in 2012.

The younger cohort, ages 18 to 24, is more likely to remain at home, with 57 percent doing so in 2012.

The main reason young adults are declining to leave the family nest is their inability to find suitable employment. And as the unemployment rate grew in the late 2000s, says Siniavskaia, so did the share of young adults who opted to stay home. Indeed, the share of unemployed in the 25-to-34 age bracket doubled, from 7 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2012.

And even though the unemployment rate started to decline in most states in 2011, the share of young adults living with parents "remain(s) stubbornly high and has even increased" in some places, the NAHB economist points out.

This, she says, suggests that it takes longer for young adults to overcome the overall sense of economic instability and gain confidence in their own financial independence before moving out of their childhood homes and into places of their own.

You've heard of homeowners who are "underwater," or who owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. Now comes a new term -- "under paper" -- for owners who have paid off their loans but can't prove it.

When you pay off your loan, you should receive a piece of paper variously called a mortgage satisfaction, mortgage release or mortgage discharge. The same paper should be sent to your local deed-recording office so it can become part of the public record.

But routine isn't always a matter of course, and the lien on your house remains a paper lien in the public records until it is removed. Worse, this scenario isn't all that unusual, says John McDermott, a real estate attorney in Chelsea, Mich. "It happens all the time."

And when your loan has been sold to another lender, maybe two or three times over, the problem becomes that much more complicated. A lender can't sign off on this important document if it doesn't own the loan or have the authority to sign as an agent of the loan's rightful owner.

The moral: When you pay off your loan, make certain you receive a mortgage satisfaction. You should receive it within 60 days of your final payment. Then, after about 30 days or so, check with your recorders' office to be certain the satisfaction has been recorded.

If you don't, and you subsequently go to sell your house, the deal could be delayed until you prove the house is debt-free. And doing that could mean a lot of extra expense.

It is not surprising that lumber is the most expensive segment of the overall construction costs in building a house. But what's the next most costly feature?

That would be excavating the site. Moving all the dirt around to where the builder wants it, and then putting in the foundation and backfilling the hole, runs nearly 10 percent of the cost to build a typical single-family house, according to the latest breakdown from the National Association of Home Builders.

Together, the cost of the windows, doors, stairs, lighting fixtures, gutters and downspouts don't account for that much, according to the figures from 2011, the latest year for which they are available.

The only cost that even approaches the expense of excavating is plumbing, which accounts for 6 percent of the total. The electrical wiring runs 4.4 percent, which is about the same as the cost of siding (4.7 percent), the heating and air-conditioning system (4.8 percent), drywall (4.4 percent) and tile and carpet (4.5 percent).

It pays to hire a professional to photograph your house when listing it for sale, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm.

This bit of news may be self-serving. After all, Redfin covers the cost of professional photos when you list with the company. But nevertheless, it says that for houses priced from $400,000 to $499,000, those professionally photographed sold for an average of $11,200 more than places shot by an amateur.

Redfin's study of houses listed and sold in 2013 in 22 major markets also found that those shot with a digital single-lens reflex camera sold 21 days faster that those shot with a point-and-shoot camera.