Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

I was pretty upset.

I'm a big advocate of living within your means. I wrote a book about how to align your money with your values and avoid debt. As a family we don't carry any except for a low-interest, 30-year mortgage. We buy used cars with cash and drive them until the odometer turns over. We opened 529 college savings accounts at the birth of each child. We save for vacations months in advance, a little at a time. Here I am trying to teach my kids the importance of debt-free living and Chase shows up at my doorstep like a crack dealer dangling easy credit.

So I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I picked up the phone and dialed the toll-free number on the offer. Not surprisingly in this age of international outsourcing, someone answers my call in India.

Going to the Source 

"Hello my name is Leo. May I have your 12-digit invitation number?" Leo then cheerfully asks me my name and address to verify that I am the person who received the offer.

"My name is Laura."

"I have your name as 'Anne.'"

"Well, see, that's why I'm calling. Anne is my daughter. She's 8 years old."

"Okay, so want to remove her name from our mailing list?"

"Well, actually I'd like to know why you would send a credit card offer to an 8-year-old in the first place."

"Let me check on that for you. One moment. May I put you on hold, ma'am?"

Leo disappears for a few minutes and then returns, passing the buck in perky telemarketer style. "According to the information provided to me, we obtained her name from one of following sources: Magazine subscription or DMV list, other assorted mailing lists, or one of the three major credit bureaus. At this point would you like me to remove her name? We handle calls on behalf of Chase. We're just the application processing line."

Leo apologizes for any inconvenience and wishes me a pleasant day. I can't help wondering what Leo really thinks about personal debt since I hear major banks are quite bullish on retail lending in India. But he seems pretty busy, so I move on. I call Chase.

"Obviously we have a policy not to solicit minors," a company spokesperson tells me. "We get lists from our partners, and we do ask that they be 18 or older. But sometimes they don't have the information, so it gets passed along to us by accident."

A week later she tracks it down: I applied for frequent flyer membership for the kids a few months earlier (figuring they might have enough miles for a free trip when they graduate from college, if the airlines are still in business). Apparently, I failed to fill in their dates of birth, so the "internal suppressions" in Chase's software didn't catch the fact that one of them is still in diapers. If the kids had filled out the credit card applications, the spokesperson reassures me, they wouldn't get the cards; as soon as Chase pulled the credit reports, it would see they had no credit history.

Keeping Debt at Bay

Somehow, this does not reassure me that my children won't get sucked into the American culture of debt. In both July and August, the most recent figures available as this column went to press, the U.S. personal savings rate was negative, meaning consumers spent more than they earned. According to the Commerce Department, July was the lowest monthly savings rate on record. If 2005 continues on this track, it may be the worst year for personal savings since the Great Depression.

The consumer's voracious appetite for debt may keep the economy swinging, but what happens when the music stops? Living on borrowed money is living on borrowed time.

Hopefully, I can shelter my kids from the culture of debt long enough to turn them into savers. I just have to screen their mail for another decade or two.