Dear Helaine: I'm in my early 30s. Three years ago, I had two job offers. One was close to home and near my friends and family, paying $50,000. The other was on the other side of the country, paying $72,000, in an area with a higher median income.

I was fresh out of grad school, frustrated with living with my parents and thought it would be nice to make some good money and explore a new life. So I took the higher offer and moved. Three years later ... I am miserable. Yes, the work is moderately interesting and offers great experience and skill-building, but I have no friends here, my co-workers are uniformly awful people, and I just overall hate living here.

The job situation is not much different than it was three years ago. The jobs I am a match for don't pay more than $60,000 back where I am from, and that's a generous estimate. The cost of living is higher, so even if I could make it work, my margin for savings, investing and traveling, which I've done a lot of the past three years, would get a lot tighter.

How much of a pay cut is it worth taking at this time in my life? What do I need to consider to help me make this decision? I don't want to go any longer being financially secure but personally miserable, but I might be putting myself in the reverse situation if I move back. -- Hopefully Homeward Bound

Dear Hopefully Homeward Bound: I feel your pain. It's very hard to feel like a fish out of water, year after year. At a certain point, it's your life; you can't go backward in time, and staying in a job you don't particularly like in a city you are not happy in isn't worth it. You took a leap into the unknown. It worked financially but not emotionally.

Cities and regions have their ways and modes of communication, and sometimes it's not a match. I'm not going to give you a lecture about joining Meetup to make new friends with your interests, or suggest you look for a new employer in this town. I assume you've already thought of that.

So what should you do next? You could work on budgeting. Come up with the amount of money you would need to live on in your hometown, and use that as your guide. At the same time, you could slowly and methodically explore other cities and see what your options are in them. There are not, after all, only two places to live in the United States. It's a big country! You could very well find another city that offers you a decent living, work you enjoy and a congenial lifestyle. Happy hunting!

(To ask Helaine a question, email her at askhelaine@gmail.com.)

(EDITORS: For editorial questions, please contact Sue Roush at sroush@amuniversal.com)

Dear Helaine: I'm in my late 20s with a good but short credit history. For the past three years, I've been aggressively paying down my student loan, and I expect to have it fully paid off by early next year. I also have one credit card through my credit union, which I use sparingly and pay off every month. I've only had this credit card for a year.

Since my student loan will no longer be on my credit report, I'd like to make sure I still have a strong credit score, and I am thinking a second credit card (preferably with airline miles) would be a good option. I know that closing my student loan could impact my credit a bit, and then opening the new account could do the same. What do you think? -- Future Score

Dear Future Score: Letters like yours are one of the things that make me want to scream -- and show the limits of the credit scoring system as it exists now. In any rational world, paying off your student loan would count as a positive. But in the crazy, mixed-up world of credit scores, it could be a negative, at least in the short run. That's because your average length of time of open credit will go down, says Anthony Davenport, the author of "Your Score: An Insider's Secrets to Understanding, Controlling and Protecting Your Credit Score."

What would I suggest? Since you have a relatively short and light credit history, a second card could help you out a bit over the long haul -- provided, that is, it's used in a way similar to what you are doing now.

The issue involves credit utilization. That's judged on a card-by-card basis. How does that work exactly? As Davenport puts it, pretend for a moment that you have a credit card with a limit of $5,000 and one with a limit of $10,000. If you put $1,000 on each card, your score is hurt more because of the $5,000 limit card.

One last note: Obviously, running up bills you can't pay is a negative, but it sounds like your habits are good, and you won't be doing that. And congrats on (almost) getting that student loan out of your life!

(To ask Helaine a question, email her at askhelaine@gmail.com.)

(EDITORS: For editorial questions, please contact Sue Roush at sroush@amuniversal.com)

Dear Helaine: My husband and I are expecting our first child in November. Currently, our only debt includes his vehicle loan, our mortgage and his student loans. We both have healthy salaries and currently live comfortably while making our monthly payments.

My question is, when it comes to extra money we receive from bonuses, tax refunds, family and the like, should we put that money into savings or toward paying down our debt? Obviously, the liquidity of savings is nice, especially with a baby. I am estimating that with child care and making payments on the debt, there won't be much left over. And debt makes me CRAZY. Hence, no credit card debt for either of us.

Is the amount of debt we have "healthy," or should I be concerned and working to pay off these debts ASAP? -- Tired of Monthly Payments

Dear Tired of Monthly Payments: First, congratulations on the baby! She or he is going to change your life. A lot. Mostly for the better -- unless you count your personal finances, that is.

That number the federal government puts out, the one saying it costs more than $200,000 to raise a child in a middle-class family to the age of 18, is not a joke. Child care is just the start of the expenses. There are clothes and equipment to buy, and medical bills to pay, and birthday gifts to buy for all the parties your child will be invited to and so on. Moreover, that six-figure sum doesn't even include college.

My suggestion: Don't make any radical readjustments to your finances yet. See how you manage your money when you are out on maternity leave, and then when you return to work and need to pay for child care. I would hate to see you pay down some of these bills only to run up credit card debt.

As for whether you should tackle the debt if it turns out your finances are just fine with the new addition, if you have three months' emergency savings for a family of three set aside, and you and your husband are investing adequate money in your retirement accounts -- I mean at least 10% of each of your own gross incomes -- then yes, you can tackle this debt. I'd start with the highest-interest loan first and work your way down from there. Good luck!

(To ask Helaine a question, email her at askhelaine@gmail.com.)

(EDITORS: For editorial questions, please contact Sue Roush at sroush@amuniversal.com)