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: Saving and debt elimination are tough on a low income. But that doesn’t mean basic math doesn’t apply in your situation. If you spend too much on your “must have” expenses, there simply won’t be enough left over to live your life, pay off your debt and save for your future.

People on lower incomes manage to stay out of debt and save money. To do so, though, they have to limit what they spend on their overhead. They find roommates or rent a room in someone else’s house, or move in with a family or an elderly person and offer to help out in exchange for part or all of their rent. Some decide they simply can’t live cheaply enough where they are, and opt to move elsewhere. Books and websites devoted to the voluntary simplicity movement can give you other concrete ideas about how to live on a shoestring.

If you can’t bear to trim your expenses, your only other option is to make more money. That’s not an easy prospect in this economy, but a second job or a side business could help you get out of debt and save for a down payment.

Answer: You need to accept your new reality, rather than papering it over with ill-advised loans or raids on your retirement accounts.

That means reducing your expenses dramatically to reflect your new, lower income. If your housing expenses eat up more than a third of your current pay, for example, you need to consider your alternatives. You have equity in your home, which should make a sale easier. If you want to hang on to the house, consider getting roommates or even renting out the house while you live elsewhere (if the rent will cover your home’s monthly expenses).

You may have loan payments or other debts taken on when you had more income that you can no longer afford. If that’s the case, discuss your situation with both a legitimate credit counselor (one affiliated with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling at http://www.nfcc.org) and a bankruptcy attorney (find referrals from the National Assn. of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys at http://www.nacba.org).

Your home equity should be reserved for emergencies, not used to finance a lifestyle you can no longer afford. And your retirement funds should be left alone for retirement.

Answer: Your bank isn’t the real problem here. Yes, banks can charge sneaky fees, and sometimes their disclosure leaves a lot to be desired. But you’re severely mismanaging your money if a $25 fee can cause this big a problem.

You should keep at least a $100 pad in your checking and keep an eagle eye on your balance to try to prevent overdrafts in the first place. If overdrafts occur despite your best efforts, then your priority should be repaying those — not writing more checks.

If you can’t manage that, then you should turn off your ability to overdraft. If you have true overdraft protection — your checking account is linked to a line of credit or credit card — ask your bank to discontinue that. You also should decline the bank’s “bounce protection,” which allows overdrafts on ATM and debit card transactions in exchange for a fee. Recurring transactions and checks can continue to trigger overdraft charges, however, so your best bet is to switch to your debit card and cash until you have a better handle on your cash flow.

Answer: What you’re experiencing is frugal fatigue. You’ve cut and you’ve cut, but you still have a long way to go. It’s easy to look at the road ahead and feel discouraged.

But you have to give yourself credit for paying off $13,000 in debt. That’s a huge achievement. Give yourself another pat on the back for staying current with your bills.

The discipline you’re learning will help you enormously in the years to come. You’ll be able to build a substantial emergency fund once the debt is paid off simply by redirecting a portion of the money you’re now sending to creditors.

In the meantime, don’t sweat the fact that you don’t have a huge savings account. Work on setting aside just $500 or so, which should cover most small setbacks and keep you from having to use your credit cards. If you have to drain your savings for an emergency, that’s OK — the fund is serving its purpose. Just build it back up again.

Earning more money is usually the fastest way to dig yourself out of a hole. If you can’t find another job or a better job, create your own job. Perhaps your work skills lend themselves to moonlighting. If your job allows you to take on freelance clients, that’s a good way to bring in extra money. Otherwise, if you have a talent or skill you can teach, do that. If you don’t, consider providing services that others need: house cleaning, house sitting, dog walking, errand running.

You can look for some ways to give yourself more breathing room. If you’ve cut all the small expenses, then it’s time to look at the big ones: your rent and your debt payment. You may be able to free up more money for saving, and for living, if you find a roommate. Also, ask your credit counseling agency about the possibility of reducing your payments a bit. It will take longer to pay off your debt but it could make life more pleasant in the meantime.

Answer: Many families are facing your dilemma: flat incomes with rising costs. But your wage garnishments and 401(k) loans indicate you have a history of mismanaging your money, which has led to even more pain.

You need the advice of an experienced bankruptcy attorney. Wage garnishments by federal law aren’t supposed to exceed 25% of your disposable income, and state laws often provide even lower limits. If you can get your garnishments adjusted or have them wiped out in a bankruptcy filing, you may be able to create more breathing room.

In the meantime, see whether you qualify for the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps). If you make too much money or have too much in assets to qualify, you can still visit a food bank to supplement what you’re able to buy.

If you can’t find a way to lower your costs further, the only solution is more income — not an easy prospect given the high unemployment rate, but you may be able to find a job at a competing business that pays more or start a business on the side.

Unfortunately, there are no miracles when it comes to money math. You can’t make two plus two equal five or have outgo that exceeds your income without eventual disaster.

Answer: Predicting future inflation is pretty tough and depends on a number of factors. Right now, for example, many used-car models are fetching significantly higher prices than in the past because of the sharp decline in sales of new models during the recession (leading to fewer available used cars now) and the fact that many owners are hanging on to their cars longer to save money. The production slowdown in Japan after its recent disasters is also affecting used-car prices.

Since predicting inflation is tough, you’d be smarter to focus on the factors you can more easily control: your savings and the condition of your current car. With proper maintenance, today’s vehicles can notch well over 200,000 miles. Owning a car for 10 years or more gives you plenty of time to save up cash to buy your next vehicle.

Answer: How about plugging the leaks that are causing your financial ship to sink, rather than musing over how much water you can take on before you’re swamped?

Steadily growing credit card debt is a clear sign it’s time to make changes to get your spending in balance with your current income. That’s because carrying credit card debt is simply too dangerous to your financial health and can lead you straight to Bankruptcy Court. It’s too easy to see something as a “need” and charge it, rather than make the tough decisions to cut back on what you can no longer afford.

For credit scoring purposes, it’s better to spread out the balances. For life purposes, it’s better to stop charging.

Make water the go-to drink. Don’t stock sodas or fruit juice, and limit milk to mealtimes. (Kids under 4 need two servings of dairy products a day; kids 4 to 8 need two to three; kids 9 to 18, four servings.) One cup of milk or yogurt or 1.5 ounces of cheese (think 6 dice-sized pieces) counts as a serving.

I used to be shocked at the idea of limiting milk—until I became a parent and saw how much a child who likes dairy will drink if left to her own devices.

Fruit juice is another liquid that’s easy to overdo. Many juices are loaded with sugar, and even those that aren’t have plenty of calories. Nutritionists tell us eating whole fruit is a better way to get our vitamins.

Forget the clean-plate club. A better way to control waste is to reduce portion size, and offer seconds if the child wants. Encouraging kids to keep eating when they’re full can set them up for eating disorders. And shrinking those portions means you can use leftovers for other meals, rather than fighting over uneaten food or scraping it into the trash.

I once watched a distracted mom grab a soup bowl, scoop about two cups of cereal into it and soak the pile with milk—before putting the meal in front of a two-year-old, who had about three spoonfuls before she declared herself “done” and toddled off. The mom probably would have had trouble finishing that much cereal. Often we don’t pay enough attention to how much food we’re shoveling into ourselves or onto our family’s plates, but cranking back can lead to dramatically less waste—and lesser waistlines, if that’s an issue.

Limit grazing. If you have athletes or teenaged boys in your house, you’ve probably come home to cupboards and a fridge that appear to have been cleaned out by locusts. (One friend’s son ate an entire loaf of bread in a single sitting.) Giving kids free range of the kitchen is expensive, and bound to lead to frustration when the ingredients you counted on for dinner have been hoovered up by Billy and his buddies. So stock a snack cabinet or shelf with healthy, relatively cheap options: air-popped popcorn, pretzels, whole grain cereals, raisins, peanut butter, apples, bananas and whole-grain crackers. Tell them they can have at those, but touching anything else will lead to dire consequences–such as cooking duties for the next week.