Answer: You have far more faith in television advertisers than you should. Just about anyone can buy advertising time, including scam artists, as long as their check to the station or channel doesn’t bounce.

Call your credit card company and let it know you’ve been scammed. Then create a paper trail: Follow up with a written letter asking that the charges be removed, your account closed and a new account opened with different numbers, since the scammer may try charging you again.

In the future, you should regard all advertisers, whatever the medium, with skepticism. If you’re purchasing from a company for the first time, at a minimum you should research its return policy and make sure it has multiple ways to be contacted in case there’s a problem. An Internet search that combines the company’s name with the word “scam” also can be illuminating.

Answer: If you don’t have a down payment saved, you aren’t ready to be homeowners.

Homeownership is expensive, with lots of unexpected costs constantly popping up. Some are relatively minor, like having to replace a worn-out appliance, while others are major, such as having to replace a furnace or a roof.

That’s why homeownership isn’t a good idea for people who aren’t already in the habit of living below their means and saving a decent proportion of their incomes.

Take the next year or so to tweak your spending and save up a down payment. You’ll need at least a 3.5% down payment to qualify for an FHA loan. A bigger down payment will give you more loan options and won’t leave you upside down on your home from the first day. A 20% down payment is often best, since you can avoid private mortgage insurance.

A year also will give you time to polish those credit scores from “OK” to “good.” The higher your scores, the better the interest rate you’ll receive.

But the fact that you’re receiving a “bad report” from your bank is worrisome. You don’t specify what happened, but anything that could be reported to the credit bureaus, such as a missed credit card payment, could cause major damage to your scores. Simply switching to another institution won’t prevent that. And if you’ve piled up a bunch of bounced checks, your credit reports may not be damaged but you could find it difficult to open new accounts at other financial institutions.

Whatever happened, you should try to straighten it out with the bank before you decamp, even if you ultimately decide to switch accounts.

Answer: When deciding whether to pay off a mortgage, many people focus on how much interest they could save or what their “return” on their money would be. (If you’re in a 35% tax bracket for federal and state income taxes, for example, your return on paying off a 7% mortgage would be 4.6%.)

In reality, though, most people have better things to do with their cash than pay off relatively low-rate, tax-deductible debt.

Are you, for example, on track with your retirement savings? Do you have a substantial emergency fund? Most families would be wise to set aside a cash reserve to cover three to six months’ worth of expenses. Someone who is self-employed with a non-working wife might want to boost that emergency fund to 12 months’ worth of expenses.

Are you adequately insured? Since your wife is financially dependent on you, you probably should have a substantial life insurance policy. You may want to get one on her as well, if she cares for minor children and you’d have to hire a nanny if she died. You may also need disability coverage.

If you’ve covered all these bases and still want to pay off your mortgages, feel free. Otherwise, put the money to better use.

Answer: Moving to a less costly part of the country is a time-honored way to make your money stretch further in retirement. It also can help you save more for retirement if you dramatically lower your living expenses.

What you don’t want to do, though, is incur all the expenses of moving and buying a new home only to discover you hate where you’re living. Do substantial research and visit your targeted communities at different times of year before you commit.

Also, tying up 60% of your portfolio in a single, illiquid asset such as a home is risky. You may well be better off moving to a cheaper area and continuing to rent until you’ve built up a bigger nest egg.

“No” is an emotionally laden word, and so few people are comfortable using it, especially when it comes to our own parents. If the 30-year-old were a client of mine, I would help him bear the pain and grief of loss. This is what any son who loves his parents and feels responsible for them must be feeling as he witnesses his parent’s financial troubles. Yet his hands are tied. The parents have a history of bad money behaviors, and the son can’t fix the problem that was probably present before his birth. “No” is the proper boundary.

If the son gives his parents a session with a financial planner, he must strengthen himself against further disappointment. If not, he will find himself in financial quicksand along with his parents.

Answer: Thanks for your response. While many would feel a moral obligation to help struggling parents, setting limits is essential. There’s also a legal component to this: See “Do you have to support your parents?“

Answer: According to ElderLawAnswers.com, a site that provides information for consumers and elder-law attorneys, 30 states have laws making adult children responsible for their parents if the parents can’t afford to take care of themselves. You can find more information and a link to the state statutes in the resources section of the website.

These laws are rarely enforced, and the 30-year-old wasn’t proposing letting his parents starve or go homeless. His parents aren’t indigent; they’re struggling to pay for a lifestyle they can no longer afford and perhaps never could.

I love my parents and want to help, but I don’t want to financially ruin myself or become their money tree. I’ve bailed them out in the past (including several months’ worth of mortgage payments to avoid foreclosure). I am 30 and have a good job, but they seem to think I have an obligation to help them. I resist doing so when I’m told they expect me to pay, but I’m troubled because the situation is affecting their health. How can I establish and maintain proper boundaries?

Answer: No one, including your parents, can dictate what you owe your family. You have to work that out for yourself.

Helping your parents with a life-threatening emergency is one thing. Repeatedly bailing them out of stressful financial situations they’ve created for themselves is quite another, particularly if you’re stinting your retirement savings or going into debt to do so.

So even if you can afford to help, the question remains whether you should. Often people who mismanage money continue to do so if enabled with cash infusions. They don’t have to change, so they won’t.

Your parents, like everyone else, need to learn to live on their current income — not what they used to make or what they hope to make soon. If they can’t cover the mortgage payments, they need to find a cheaper place to live — preferably one that costs less than 30% of what they currently earn. (If your father’s income is extremely irregular, they may need to base their affordable rent on your mother’s income plus whatever he’s reasonably sure he can make each month.)

So instead of giving cash, you might give them a session with a fee-only financial planner (you can get referrals to planners that charge by the hour from Garrett Planning Network, at http://www.garrettplanningnetwork.com) or ask them to meet with a budgeting counselor at a nonprofit credit counseling agency (you can get referrals at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, at http://www.nfcc.org). You can make these education efforts a requirement of any further financial help from you.

If they can’t manage a decent lifestyle on their incomes despite their best efforts, you may want to step in to help. But just as they weren’t obligated to hand you cash with no strings attached, neither are you required to dole out money freely to them.

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: Let’s first get clear on some terminology. CDs and money markets are types of investments, while IRAs and Roth IRAs are types of accounts — specifically, they’re retirement accounts. Think of IRAs and Roth IRAs as buckets into which you put investments, such as CDs, money markets, stocks, bonds or mutual funds.

The next thing you need to get clear about is your plan for your savings. If the money is meant to be an emergency fund, to tide you over in case of job loss or a large expense, then you probably shouldn’t put it in a retirement account, which could have penalties or restrictions on withdrawals.

You also shouldn’t put your emergency fund into investments that could lose value in the short term, such as stocks, bonds or most mutual funds. The best place for emergency money is usually a federally insured bank account. If your bank isn’t paying much interest, you can check with others, including online banks and credit unions, to see if you can get a slightly better return.

If you don’t need the whole sum as an emergency stash, however, then you might want to think about taking more risk to get more return, and perhaps using an IRA or Roth IRA as your savings vehicle. To learn more, check out Kathy Kristof’s “Investing 101″ or Eric Tyson’s “Investing for Dummies.”

Answer: Please rethink this plan, because your family probably cannot afford this education.

Federal student loans would allow your son to borrow, at most, about a third of this school’s cost. If he were to borrow the rest of the money, he would have to turn to private student loans, which have variable rates and none of the consumer protections embedded in federal student loans. Private student loans are like using credit cards to pay for college — except unlike credit card debt, student loan debt can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.

The other alternative would be for you to borrow the difference between his federal student loans and the cost of his education using PLUS loans. These are federal education loans for parents and graduate students. As with federal student loans, the rates for PLUS loans are fixed, although they’re somewhat higher — 7.9%, compared with 6.8% for unsubsidized Stafford student loans.

But using PLUS loans means taking on a lot of debt at a time in your life when you should be concentrating on saving for your own retirement. If making the payments would interfere with your ability to contribute sufficiently to your retirement funds, you shouldn’t even consider borrowing the money.

Even if you already have a well-funded retirement plan, you should think twice. Your son may be able to get a better, more affordable education from a public college — particularly if he starts at a two-year community college nearby, allowing him to live at home more cheaply, and then transfers to a four-year school.

For-profit colleges can be expensive, and loans made to students who attend four-year for-profit colleges have twice the default rates of loans made to other college students. Figures provided by the U.S. Department of Education show that of loans that entered repayment in 1995, 30% of those made to students attending four-year for-profit colleges were in default 15 years later, compared with 15.1% for four-year public colleges and 13.6% for four-year private nonprofit schools.

That high default rate should give you pause, even if you were paying cash for this education, because it indicates that many graduates either aren’t finishing their educations or aren’t finding jobs that pay well enough to repay their loans.

Critics complain that for-profit schools often over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to training students for existing jobs. The for-profit schools attribute high default rates to the demographics of their students, who are more likely to be lower income and from minority groups than other college attendees.

You may feel guilty for shorting your son when it came to saving for college. But please don’t compound the problem by blessing an education that could leave him, and you, with unaffordable debt.