Answer: It’s smart to put at least a few hundred dollars in the bank before you begin to pay down your debts. That way, if you face a small financial setback, you can tap your emergency fund and not have to add to your debt. But it doesn’t make sense to wait until you have several months’ worth of expenses saved before you pay debt, because that can take years to accomplish and you’d pay a fortune in interest in the meantime.

Answer: Doctors can be surprisingly ignorant of the cost of medications, so your first call should be to your pharmacist to see if there are more affordable options, such as a generic drug. If so, call the doctor back to see if your husband can switch.

Either way, start shopping around. Medication costs vary enormously from pharmacy to pharmacy. You also should check to see if a mail-order pharmacy might save you some money.

Be sure to ask about discounts. Pharmacies may offer discounts for cash or with certain memberships, such as with AARP. Prescription discount cards are easy to find — just type “prescription discount card” into an Internet search engine — but steer clear of those that charge fees.

Also check NeedyMeds.org, which lists discounts and assistance programs specific to hundreds of medications. NeedyMeds also has a free prescription discount card.

Answer: You don’t say how old you are, how much you’ve saved for retirement already or what your other debts are. All those factors help determine where your savings should go.

You’re smart to be contributing to a 401(k) and getting the full company match. You can use an online retirement calculator, like the one at ChooseToSave.org, to see if you’re saving enough. If you’re not, you can boost your contributions.

If you’re on track for retirement, the next step is to pay off any toxic debt such as credit cards. (Toxic debt is any debt that carries high or variable rates and that erodes, rather than enhances, your wealth.) Once that’s paid off, you can focus on building up your emergency fund. In general, it’s smart to have at least three months’ worth of expenses in a savings account to be tapped in case of real emergency, such as a job loss.

Answer: Build up your emergency fund.

Because you charged your emergencies, you used up more of your available credit. The more of your credit you use, the more negatively your scores tend to react. It doesn’t matter that you paid your balances off each month. What counts is the balances that your credit card issuers report to the credit bureaus, which are typically the balances on your latest statements.

Now, the good news is that your scores probably will recover as soon as you start charging less. But you should take this as a sign that credit cards are a poor substitute for savings. An emergency fund could help you survive life’s inevitable setbacks without having to run to your cards.

Answer: All over the Internet. Start with one of the oldest frugal-living sites, the Dollar Stretcher, at www.stretcher.com. It’s filled with articles and tips for every budget, including the tightest. Mary Hunt’s Debt-Proof Living at www.debtproofliving.com is another good one to try. You also should check your local library for the book “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. It will open your eyes to the possibilities of financial freedom on any income.

Recently, I have had an overdraft experience that leaves me wondering about ethics and legalities. It was three days from payday and I had about $45 in my account.

I made four purchases under $10. Then a $54 automatic payment came through that I could not reschedule. One would think I would then be charged one overdraft fee, as all of the previous purchases made were within my available funds at the time.

I logged in today to find that the bank cleared the largest transaction first, which threw all other small transactions into overdraft. I was charged five overdraft fees because of this rearrangement of clearance order. I talked to a customer service manager who said that nothing could be done.

Essentially, it appears that the bank is manipulating transactions to capitalize on overdraft fees. This strikes me as unethical, and I wonder if I have any rights in this situation? Aside from getting a better job and making more money, what can I do to protect myself?

Answer: Of course the bank is manipulating your transactions to increase its fees. Most banks do. Lawmakers and regulators have questioned the practice, but so far it’s not illegal.

What you can do to protect yourself is to stop living paycheck to paycheck. That may sound like a flip answer when you’re on the financial edge, but you’ll never get ahead as long as a $54 overdraft can throw your finances into chaos.

Having just a $500 cushion in the bank can reduce not just bounced-check fees but also worry, sleeplessness and lost productivity at work, according to a savings review by Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America.

How do you get a cushion? Try a “no spending” month. Limit your purchases to true essentials. Eat out of your cupboards instead of at restaurants. Entertain yourself at home or at the library. Most people can raise at least a couple hundred dollars this way, which you could supplement by having a yard sale and selling unneeded items online.

If you want more ideas, there are a wealth of frugal-living websites; start with one of the oldest, the Dollar Stretcher, at www.stretcher.com.

You also need to limit the bank’s ability to swamp you with “gotcha” fees.

First, sign up for true overdraft protection. Banks often automatically enroll you in an inferior substitute, called “bounce protection” or “courtesy overdraft.” These programs allow the banks to approve over-limit transactions and charge you $30 or more for each one.

True overdraft, by contrast, links your checking account to another of your own accounts: typically a savings account, line of credit or credit card. If your transaction exceeds your balance, the money is drawn from one of these accounts. You’ll pay an annual fee of around $50 and possibly a $10 per transaction fee, but the costs for making a mistake will be substantially lower than under bounce protection.

If the bank won’t approve you for true overdraft, ask it to stop approving over-limit transactions. If it won’t, take your business elsewhere.

 

If you can’t manage this bill without sacrificing your own retirement plans or your daughter’s education, then you need to think about some options.

If your son has his heart set on this college, then he should be willing to take on at least part of the cost by incurring student loans. (He should be careful, though, to make sure that his total student loan debt doesn’t exceed the salary he expects to make in his first year out of school.)

Another option, obviously, is for him to attend a less expensive school for at least a couple of years, if not the duration of his education.

The fact that you’re asking this question just months before your son starts college indicates that you haven’t done enough thinking and planning, but it’s not too late.

Head to the bookstore or library and grab a copy of a college financing guide and explore your options. You might also use FinAid.org’s expected family contribution calculator, available at http://www.finaid.org , to estimate how much you’ll have to kick in once your daughter starts school.

Good luck.

We recently went to put some papers into one of the two boxes we maintain at a bank where we’ve been customers for more than 20 years. We were given the box and I almost fainted when I discovered it was empty.

Apparently it had been drilled in error. After a week of searching, bank employees found part of our box contents tied up in a plastic bag. But property was missing that was historic, personal and irreplaceable. We had papers in there with our names on them, but apparently no effort was made to contact us.

It is a horrifying situation that a bank can be so casual and apparently unconcerned with property that most people assume will be secure. This should be made public more often.

Answer: As you’ve read here before, banks are required by law to make an effort to contact box owners before a safe deposit container is drilled and emptied, but sometimes those efforts are pretty cursory. (The fact that you were longtime customers and that your names were on papers in the box shows just how cursory.)

Some readers say they’ve tried to prevent situations like yours by putting their full contact information on a sheet of paper atop the contents of their boxes. In any case, you also should check on your box a couple of times a year and ask your bank during those visits whether you’re up to date on your box rental fees.

Many times, after a merger, banks begin to charge customers who used to have free box rental. Longtime customers may assume the charges don’t apply to them, because they’ve had free rental for so long, and fail to pay the bill. The bank could then decide the box has been abandoned and drill it open.

Managing your money well gives you the power to achieve what you really want in life while dialing back the anxiety that plagues people who live paycheck to paycheck.

Budgets tend to fail when people view them as an awful exercise in deprivation, instead of as a tool to help them stop wasting money on things they don’t really want so that they can get the things they do. Once you view your spending plan in this light, it’s easier to skip those sales and invitations.

You might want some inspirational reading. “Your Money or Your Life” by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin would be an excellent beginning. You might find David Bach’s “Start Late, Finish Rich” helpful as well. (Savings tip: Check these out at your local library or buy them used online.)

Let go of ideas about where you “should be” at this stage. You are where you are. Regrets about not having more, or being able to spend more, can lead you to chuck the whole idea of a budget.

You also may find it helpful to seek out a support group of people who are trying to get their finances under control. You might join an online forum, or the Simple Living Network at http://www.simpleliving.net can direct you to study groups in various cities that use “Your Money or Your Life” as their basic text.

You can do this. Good luck!