April has been Credit Card Question and Answer month here at Financial Elite. We continue with Part 3 with information provided from an article from SmartMoney about the little known rules that are costing you money and putting your credit, your identity and your family at risk.
Most parents send their children off to college knowing that they will be bombarded with credit card offers, but what parent's don't know is that credit card companies are taking their marketing one step farther, they are hitting up high school students. College students are considered "good risks" to creditors, because they are just starting out and they have unlimited earning potential and now high school students are being put into that category as well.
Robert D. Manning, author of "Credit Card Nation" and a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology says that most parents do not realize how early a child's name, address, and other information, can turn up in the databases used by credit card companies to market their products- or that children as young as 16 can get credit cards without parental consent.
Creditors know that if kids get in trouble that their parents will usually pay to bail them out.
So as a parent what can you do to protect your child's financial future? Protect your child's information and assume that all requests, however legitimate, will land in a database somewhere. Gift cards, for instance, may offer protection if lost or stolen, but they do require personal information. Manning and other experts advise teaching teens about credit well before they get their first credit cards and monitor their spending as they learn to use them.
No comments:
Post a Comment