This dissertation is organized into three chapters spanning household finance and real estate finance. The first two chapters examine the long-term effects of youth and childhood mental health on financial outcomes, while the third chapter investigates the role of community banks in commercial real estate lending in the U.S. market. The first chapter examines the long-term effects of youth mental health challenges on financial distress in adulthood using nationally representative survey data. I find that individuals with a higher propensity for youth mental health problems are significantly more likely to experience distress related to unsecured debt, but not secured debt. Differences in time preferences, noncognitive abilities, and financial behaviors, including borrowing decisions, credit access, perceived costs of default, and financial planning, help explain both the overall relationship and its concentration in unsecured debt. To address endogeneity concerns, I instrument youth mental health propensity with prenatal exposure to alcohol, providing suggestive evidence of a causal link. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of policies aimed at improving youth mental health as a means of mitigating financial distress in early adulthood. The second chapter studies how childhood mental health conditions shape financial outcomes later in life. Individuals with these conditions are more financially fragile, as they have thinner wealth buffers and are therefore more exposed to shocks. They hold fewer assets, are less likely to own a home over the life cycle and carry more debt. Using a two-stage approach that predicts childhood mental health with a polygenic score for major depressive disorder, confirms these results. Childhood mental health conditions are also associated with lower overconfidence, shorter life expectancy and financial planning horizons, a more pessimistic economic outlook, and lower cognitive ability. The third chapter shifts to real estate finance and investigates the role of community banks in commercial real estate (CRE) lending during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of heightened uncertainty in a market characterized by informational frictions. Using bank-level Call Reports, property-level loan data from MSCI, and leasing outcomes from Compstak, we compare lending decisions and associated outcomes of community and large banks during this period. We show that community banks increased CRE lending during the pandemic, primarily within their local markets, and in large part by financing properties previously funded by large banks, notably for more informationally sensitive sales-loans rather than refinancing of previously known assets. Community banks also experienced lower foreclosure rates on loans issued during this period and stronger operating performance of the properties financed across several major property types. These findings are consistent with a model of banking competition in which community banks can leverage superior local information against the lower cost of capital of large banks when uncertainty is high.