Answer: Your family needs to take action, but setting your mother up for not just one but possibly two future moves probably isn’t the best course. Moving is terribly disruptive, and AARP surveys show that the vast majority of older people prefer to “age in place” rather than leave their homes.

Investigate reverse mortgages as one option. With a reverse mortgage, your mom could pay off her small mortgage and tap the substantial equity in her home. She could get a lump sum, a stream of monthly checks or a line of credit that could allow her to fix her home and live more comfortably. She wouldn’t have to make payments or pay income taxes on this loan, and it wouldn’t have to be paid off until she dies or moves out.

Reverse mortgages can be expensive because of the fees involved, although a new version of the federal Home Equity Conversion Mortgage offers lower upfront fees, and some lenders will waive or reduce their fees. You’ll want to do plenty of research, and shop around to make sure you get the best deal. The AARP and U.S. Housing and Urban Development websites have a lot of information about reverse mortgages.

If your mom decides she’d rather sell, she should consider a move directly to a senior community that offers assisted living as an option. She will have the most choices if she’s healthy when she moves in. Although she may never need the assisted living option, many people start to need some kind of help with daily activities by the time they reach their mid-80s.

Answer: You’ve pointed out another problem with using Social Security numbers as an all-purpose identifier. Federal and state laws require businesses that collect Social Security numbers to protect that information. But the fact remains that the more entities that have your number, the more vulnerable you may be to identity theft.

As an individual, you’re unlikely to change the IRS’ mind about the necessity of collecting this information. But when you’re asked for your Social Security or tax ID number, it’s fair to ask the requester how your information will be protected. That at least puts the requester on notice that you expect the laws regarding the safeguarding of personal information to be followed.

Answer: Closing accounts won’t help your credit scores, and may hurt them. If you’re trying to improve your scores or plan to get a major loan in the next several months, leave them open.

If your scores are fine and you don’t expect to apply for a mortgage or car loan soon, then you certainly can close a few retail cards. But try to keep open your major credit cards, such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.

Answer: If you’re on track saving for retirement and your child’s college education, then the smart thing would be to gut it out and get the property paid off. You’re so close to the end of this loan that the majority of your payments go toward principal. Refinancing might lower your payments, but would dramatically increase the amount of interest you’d pay over time.

If you’re stinting your savings, though, the math gets more complicated. You could view the paid-off vacation home as an asset you could tap later for retirement expenses or college. In that case, getting it paid off on the current schedule would make sense. If selling or borrowing against the home in the future isn’t an option, though, then lowering your payments so you can save for your other goals starts to make some sense.

If that’s the option you choose, consider a 15-year loan rather than a 30-year loan. The shorter loan will still dramatically reduce your payment but you’ll pay about 60% less interest over time.

Answer: If you live in a high-cost area but don’t have a high income, you’ll need to get creative if you want to keep your “must have” expenses—shelter, food, transportation, child care, minimum loan payments and insurance—under 50% of your after-tax income.

Many people in high-cost areas devote 40% or more of their incomes to shelter costs, which makes it all but impossible to have enough money left over for their “wants” (clothes, vacations, gifts and other non-necessities that should consumer 30% of their after-tax incomes savings, according to the 50/30/20 plan) or savings and debt repayment (which should consume 20% of your after-tax income under the plan). The result is a perpetually unbalanced budget, which often leads to more debt and lots of anxiety.

But people have come up with various solutions to better balance their budgets. Blogger Donna Freedman was an apartment manager for several years, which helped lower her shelter costs. Fred Ecks, who retired in his 40s, lived on a boat to reduce his rent in notoriously high-cost San Francisco. Other people have exchanged their services for free or reduced rent—by babysitting or serving as a companion to an elderly person.

If you can’t find a solution that lowers your housing costs, you have two options: continue to live with a lopsided budget, and accept that you may never be able to achieve a balanced financial life, or move to a place where you can make the math work.

Answer: The primary concern with paying off a loan is that the lender may stop reporting the account to the credit bureaus. Although there are limits to how long most negative information can stay on a credit report, there are no limits to how long good information can or must be reported.

Still, most lenders continue to report accounts that have been paid off for several years. If you can pay off a high-rate loan, you probably should, and trust that you’ll get “credit” for your on-time payments for years to come.

Answer: If your nephew wants to try to sue his mother, or file a criminal complaint against her, he should talk to an attorney about his options. Money that’s placed in a trust or custodial account for a child’s benefit is no longer the parent’s to take, although too many parents don’t understand this and grab at an easy source of funds when money gets tight.

In the more likely case that he doesn’t want to take formal action against his mother, he could simply ask her to return the money she took. His chances of success may not be great — people who steal from their kids may not be eager to make amends — but he likely stands no chance if he doesn’t ask.

Answer: The first thing you need to do is opt out of your bank’s bounced-check protection program. You may think you need to borrow money this way to make ends meet, but as you’ve discovered, it’s driving you further into the hole.

Next, rethink your participation in the debt management program. It was honorable of you to try to avoid bankruptcy, but it’s pretty clear you can’t afford to continue with this program if doing so leaves you in default on your student loan obligations. Credit card debts can be erased in Bankruptcy Court; student loan debt can almost never be wiped out that way.

If you have federal student loans, you may be able to qualify for the income-based repayment program, which caps your payment at a reasonable amount and erases any remaining balance after 10 years in a public service job (such as teaching in the public school system). Otherwise, the balance is erased after 25 years of payments. If you have private loans, you have far fewer options for repayment, but wiping out the credit card debt would free up more money to pay these loans back. Talk to your lenders to see what options you may have.

Another factor to consider is how much you’re spending on housing. If you own a home, the mortgage and related home-owning costs may simply be too much for you on your current income. Getting rid of the house in a short sale, or even letting it go into foreclosure, may be a far better option than continuing to cling to a home you can’t afford.

Bankruptcy, short sales and foreclosures are all drastic options. But some financial problems are so great that a drastic solution is the only reasonable choice if you ever want to get back on your financial feet.

Answer: You need to have the conversation you probably should have initiated a few years ago, before she started the college application process. She must understand that what she wants and what you can afford to provide for her may be two very different things.

Start by applying for financial aid at the colleges that have accepted her (let’s hope she applied to more than one). The “estimated family contribution” calculator at FinAid.org can give you a rough idea of what you’ll be expected to pay, but the actual package you’re offered can vary somewhat depending on how much the school wants your daughter to attend. You may want to invest in some books to help you understand the process, such as the Princeton Review’s “Paying for College Without Going Broke, 2012 Edition” and education expert Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s workbook, “Shrinking the Cost of College,” available at thecollegesolution.com.

Once you have the financial aid offers you can see which schools may be within your grasp and which are too expensive. Some schools encourage students and their parents to borrow heavily to attend, but that can lead to financial disaster — particularly since she has so many years of schooling ahead. Your daughter should try to limit her borrowing for her undergraduate education to what’s available through the federal student loan program (typically $33,000, total) and avoid private student loans, which have fewer consumer protections.

You as a parent can borrow through the federal PLUS program, but it’s easy to go overboard. The PLUS program will lend you up to the full cost of your daughter’s education, but the loan payments could be overwhelming and could prevent you from retiring. Student loan debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, so you should be cautious about taking it on.

Your daughter should be able to cobble together an affordable education if she’s flexible about where she gets her undergraduate degree. Beyond that, she should know that the military and the National Health Service Corps pay for medical school in exchange for several years of service.

Answer: One of the many persistent myths about credit is that having too many cards is bad for your credit scores. In reality, the leading credit scoring formula, the FICO, doesn’t punish you for having “too much” available credit. You can, however, hurt your credit scores by closing accounts.

If you’re not going to be in the market for a new loan any time soon, you can certainly close a few retail cards if you no longer use them and don’t want the hassle of keeping track of those accounts. But you’ll probably want to keep open your major credit card accounts (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express) unless there’s a compelling reason to close them, such as an annual fee you don’t want to pay.