Answer: You’re not dealing with a financial advisor who has your best interests at heart. You’re dealing with a salesman who is mostly, if not solely, concerned about the commission he’s going to earn from selling you an insurance or investment product should you take his unsound advice.

Borrowing to invest is a risky strategy. Putting your home on the line to do so is particularly unwise. The interest rates on your home equity loan may be low now, but the rate is variable and can rise substantially. If you can’t make the payments, you could lose your home.

If he were honest, this is the pitch he would have made to you: “You don’t make enough money to afford the product I want to sell to you. Therefore, I want you to put your home at risk so I can make this commission. Your borrowing costs and the costs of this investment will likely eat up most of your returns, but at least I’ll have my money.”

If he’s selling insurance, you should report him to your state’s insurance commissioner. If he’s selling stocks or other investments, report him to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If he has any professional investment credentials — which isn’t likely, but anything is possible — you should report him to the organizations that granted those.

Remember that anyone can call himself or herself a financial advisor. There are no education, experience or ethics requirements. If you want someone who meets higher standards, look for a certified financial planner or a personal financial specialist (a designation given to certified public accountants with financial planning training).

And pay attention to how the planner is paid. A fee-only planner accepts only the fees you pay, while a “fee-based” planner may accept commissions from the products he or she sells. If you don’t want commissions to affect the advice you get, consider a fee-only planner.

Answer: No one knows what the future will bring. But we’ve been through tumultuous times in the stock market many times in the past. Between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, for example, the Dow Jones industrial average benchmark of stock prices pretty much went nowhere, pinging back and forth between about 600 and 1,000. (Just do a Web search for “Dow Jones history” and you’ll turn up charts that show this.) People were pretty disgusted with stock market returns, and many were pessimistic about the future of our economy. Through the rest of the 1980s and ’90s, though, stock market returns exploded.

In every 30-year period since 1928, stocks have had an average annual return of at least 8%. Those who hung on through bad times were eventually rewarded for ignoring the doom-and-gloomers.

You should take a few minutes to read his last column for the Times, because it offers a sense of perspective that’s too often missing from today’s business coverage. He writes:

I’m stepping away at a time that is strikingly reminiscent of my first few years in the business of covering financial markets and the economy. That was 1979-82, in what was then considered the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression.

Sound familiar?

…

Many Americans’ attitude toward the stock market was exactly the same then as now. In 1979 the market was mistrusted or outright despised. What was the point of owning stocks? The Dow Jones industrial average was no higher in 1979 than it had been in 1964.

The rest of that story is that after so many years of pinging between 600 and 1,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the 1980s finally started its long, explosive climb upwards. (The DJIA closed today at 11,555.)

Many of you reading this probably don’t remember those years, and some of you who do are convinced it’s different this time. Like Tom, I’ve been hearing the doom-and-gloomers predict the end of the economic world for decades now. And whaddya know…we’re still here.

This is not to downplay the severe financial beating so many have experienced. There are people who have lost everything they had, and who aren’t likely to get all or even most of it back. The unemployment rate is scary and so is the all the debt we’ve accrued, as people and as nations.

But we have survived worse. I think we will again.

Answer: The most important thing you need to know about investing is that there is no such thing as a truly risk-free investment.

You won’t lose your principal if you invest in “safe” investments, such as Treasuries and FDIC-insured bank accounts. But you won’t earn enough to keep ahead of inflation. Basically, you’ll never be able to save enough to retire, since the purchasing power of your funds will erode over time rather than grow.

To stay ahead of inflation, you need to take more risk. Stocks over time have consistently offered returns that beat inflation. In every 30-year period starting in 1928, stocks have returned average annual returns of at least 8%. But they certainly don’t gain that much every year, and some years you’ll face steep losses. When you invest in stocks, you have to be prepared for volatility. In other words, sometimes your investments will lose money.

You can reduce that volatility somewhat by diversifying your stock investments (some small companies, some large; some U.S. companies, some foreign) and by including a diversified mix of bonds in your portfolio, along with cash.

A fee-only financial planner can help you design an investment plan that makes sense for your situation. Or you can consider opting for the “lifestyle” or “target date retirement” funds offered by your plan, since they do the diversification and rebalancing for you.

Answer: If you’re prone to panic, you should turn off the television pundits who like to scare people, which seems to be most of them.

What you need are perspective and balance. If you’re within 10 years of retirement, you should invest in a session with a fee-only financial planner to make sure your portfolio is appropriately diversified. Taking too little risk can be as dangerous as taking too much when you have a 20-year (or longer) retirement horizon.

Over time, the stock market does march upward, although it’s never a smooth path.

If you’re hyperventilating over the latest market gyrations, read Ron Lieber’s latest post at the New York Times’ Bucks Blog: “People who should sell stocks now.”

Finally, check out “Never dumpster dive for plastic containers” at Donna Freedman’s Surviving and Thriving blog. Donna and I have both lost family members to colon cancer, so I hope you’ll take to heart the serious message wrapped inside Donna’s usual loopy humor.

We in the media need to make that clear. We’ve been excoriating Congressional bungling and inaction so loudly that many ordinary people are getting the impression the world is about to end.

It’s not. A default would have some seriously bad affects—including raising the interest rates on the national debt that everyone professes to care so much about. One of the basics of money management is that if you’re in debt, you want to keep your interest rates as low as possible to get out of debt faster. Doing something that makes your interest rates rise is just stupid. But right now, “stupid” is Congress’ middle name.

So what can you do with your own money to prepare in case we do default? My thoughts:

Move your cash from money markets to FDIC-insured bank accounts. The average interest rate on money market mutual funds is .25%, and they aren’t federally insured. The risk that money funds would “break the buck” and lose principle is probably minimal, but you’re not being compensated for taking any risk, so you’d be better off in an online bank account paying 1% or so.

Don’t invest in gold. Gold is a hugely speculative investment. The gold bubble has been growing for years, and the last time this happened the crash was pretty awful. In fact, the price of gold still hasn’t climbed back to its previous 1980 peak in inflation-adjusted terms. Buying gold or gold mining shares right now is gambling, not investing.

Make sure you’re diversified. Bailing out of the stock market isn’t a good choice. Congress will get its act together eventually. If it doesn’t do so before the default, it will do so quickly afterward, once the stock market plunges. Either way, if you’re out of the market you’ll miss the relief rally. In any case, trying to time the market is all but impossible. If you’re invested in a broadly-diversified mix of stock and bond mutual funds, you should be able to hang on for the bumpy ride. (One way to get quickly diversified is to put your money into a “lifestyle” or “target date” fund, that does all the diversification and rebalancing for you. Most workplace retirement plans and brokerages offer these.) But remember that money you’ll need within five years should be in a safe, easily accessible bank account, not invested in the stock market. That’s true under any market conditions, but if you’ve been taking chances you shouldn’t, now is the time to correct that.

Answer: If your advisor gets paid a commission for selling annuities, as she probably does, she’s not an objective source for you on this topic. Consider investing a few hundred dollars to consult a fee-only financial planner, who can review your financial situation and your investments and offer advice.

Variable annuities aren’t always a terrible option, but they’re a poor fit for IRAs, which already offer the tax deferral that’s a big part of an annuity’s appeal. The so-called living benefits that guarantee a certain payoff typically come at a high price, which is why you should always run these investments past an objective source before you buy.

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: Remember the Depression? World Wars I and II? The Cold War? The assassination of President Kennedy? Vietnam? Watergate?

Probably not, because you weren’t around. Regardless of the setbacks we’ve faced, however, our economy — and stocks — continue to grow.

Investing in stocks is essentially investing in the productivity of our companies. If you want a graphic representation of that growth, use a search engine to find a chart showing “Dow Jones historical average.” You’ll see that this market benchmark has had numerous setbacks, many of them serious, but its growth has been exponential. The Dow started 1932 at 100, for example; in the 1970s, it bobbed around 1,000; it started this year well over 11,000.

Yes, there will be scams and scandals and people gaming the system. The fact remains that no other investment has the inflation-beating history or potential that stocks have. If you hope to retire someday, a good portion of your portfolio likely needs to be in stocks.

As for gold, here’s another little bit of history you should know. Although it’s been on a tear lately, the price of gold still hasn’t returned to the peak in value it enjoyed in 1980, once you adjust for inflation.