Handling your personal finances used to be simple. Not anymore.

Now you practically need a full-time financial adviser to help sort though the myriad decisions you have to make about your money.

To help with these and other issues, I asked financial planner David John Marotta, president of Charlottesville, Va.-based Marotta Asset Management Inc., to join me in an online discussion recently at washingtonpost.com.

Marotta wasn’t able to answer all the questions during our chat, so I asked him to answer in this column some of the questions that repeatedly came up.

Q: I just began working for a new employer. I have more than $65,000 in my old 401(k). Should I roll it into my new employer’s 401(k) plan or open an Individual Retirement Account?

A: I would recommend rolling your old 401(k) into an account at a brokerage firm that you can manage yourself. The main advantage is that you can pick from hundreds of mutual funds that are not among the limited choices you may have with your new employer. The only drawback is that you will have two retirement accounts and therefore have more paperwork and more decisions to make.

Q: We have almost $500,000 in retirement savings and about $275,000 in home equity. Should we refinance our 15-year mortgage and a 10-year home equity loan (both halfway paid off)? A new 30-year loan at a little over 6 percent would really help our cash flow. We’re both 52.

A: I would recommend refinancing and getting a 30-year fixed mortgage. This ensures that you will be paying mostly interest for the first 10 years and get the largest tax benefits of mortgage interest. Think of it this way: The federal government has promised to pay you 30 percent of any interest payment you make (assuming you’re in a 30 percent tax bracket). If you reduce the amount of your payment by getting a 15-year loan then the checks from the government will stop coming sooner.

After getting a 30-year mortgage, put some portion of the monthly savings into a cash reserve so that you won’t require a home equity line of credit for any emergencies.

Q: What kind of asset is a Series I Bond?

A: U.S. I Bonds should be considered as fixed income or a bond investment in your portfolio allocation, even though they can be cashed in after six months.

Bonds are issued by the U.S. Treasury and are designed to protect the purchasing power of your money by assuring you get a rate of return that keeps pace with inflation. The earnings rate is a combination of a fixed rate, which will apply for the life of the 30-year bond, and a variable semiannual rate based on changes in the consumer price index. Series I Bonds are now yielding 2.57 percent. The rate may change on Nov. 1 for the following six months.

You can buy I Bonds from most local financial institutions or directly from the Bureau of the Public Debt. Go to www.savingsbond.gov for more information.