Love and money can be a complicated mix, especially when someone you love wants to borrow a little credit mojo from you. You may know that co-signing is a risk, but that doesn’t make it easy to turn down a loved one who’s asking for help.

But there are ways to soften the blow and valuable, useful alternatives you can offer instead of co-signing.

I mentioned in my last post that cosigning loans is risky. How risky? According to the FTC, depending on the type of the loan, as many as three out of four primary borrowers default on their obligations, leaving the cosigner to pay. This is, after all, why they need a cosigner: they’re not good credit risks, either because they have too much debt already, or because they don’t pay their bills on time.

(What about someone with no credit history? Contrary to popular belief, you can get a mortgage with a zero credit score–there are credit unions and companies like Churchill Mortgage that do manual underwriting of loans. If you want to help someone establish credit for the first time, give them $500 to get a secured credit card, then encourage them to make modest charges and pay off every month. Problem solved.)

You can help your loved one get that apartment, car or college degree without co-signing.

If you have the financial means, either borrow the money yourself or take it out of savings and lend it to the person who asked you to co-sign, recommends Kelley Long, a Chicago-based certified public accountant and a certified financial planner. You can draw up a loan agreement with reasonable interest.

A few years back, Terri Cullen wrote a very good piece on making that hard decision for a relative who wanted help getting a consolidation loan. She clearly agonized about the decision, but what she did was absolutely right. Consolidation loans do not have a good track record at helping people get out from under debt (the same is true for rolling high-interest debts into a mortgage or home equity loan.) According to most estimates I’ve seen, only a minority of people who consolidate debt actually end up paying those debts off; according to one estimate, after two years 70% up with the same (or more) debt than they started out with.