Credit Card Debt for the Tween Set

Credit Card Debt for the Tween Set

www.truthdig.com

Sen. Byron Dorgan took the chamber floor with visual aids to warn of the dangers of luring small children into bad spending habits with colorful credit cards.
...
"We think our target age group will be from 10 to 14, although it could certainly go younger." Senior Vice President, Bruce Juliano of Samuel Inc Hello kitty Card
cspan coverage

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.reuters.com
www.kxmb.com
www1.bankofamerica.com

Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Lloyds TSB gives Visa cards to 11-year-olds
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[edit on 18-5-2009 by The All Seeing I]

As Maddow potently and brilliantly put it at the very end of her segment... "Don't we own Bank of America since the bank bailout ... doesn't that make us complacent in this?

Clear evidence that corporations are heartless/soulless money making machines.

Link to Bank of America Hello Kitty Card

Link to Senator Dorgan's presentation




www.truthdig.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Are we sure this is geared towards kids? Not trying to be stereotypical, but maybe it is aimed towards Japanese, Japanophiles or the like. My Japanese wife is not into hello kitty, but my very adult sister in law is. I also know some very adult Taiwanese women who are really into hello kitty. Just saying, maybe they aren't after kids.

But then again, you're probably right. They don't care who they make a buck off of.

I don't think this card is targeting kids. Many teens and some adults like hello kitty. I don't think kids even know what credit cards are. If they did they wouldn't understand how to deal with them. They would just spend and think it was a gift

Originally posted by The All Seeing I
... corporations are heartless/soulless money making machines.

There are some corporations with heart and soul, or at least started out that way. But for-profit corporations are there to make money...period.

And they'll do that in ways they can legally do...using laws made for them after political contributions, and if that fails, then they'll see what they can get away with.

Lordy, I can remember in elementary school in the 1950's and 1960's, we actually had a savings program made for students, with deposit slips and little booklets in which to record our savings.
That was back when middle class meant you had money to save. Since 1980, savings, and the middle class, have been shrinking.

Little Martha got $ for her birthday from grandma and grandpa?...I was taught to save it for something I wanted. Now Martha can use it to pay off her credit card debt.

Children (as the rest of us!) have been turned into "consumers", so much so, that the debt industry has consumed the middle class.

I grew up with Hello Kitty- heck, we practically share the same birthday... I opened an additional account just to get this card (I didn't want my husband to have to carry one)!

I don't know that it's geared toward younger sorts, but if it is I guess the joke is on them... SUCKERS!!! :-P

Originally posted by desert
Children (as the rest of us!) have been turned into "consumers"

Marketing has transformed itself into a sophisticated, pervasive force that extends into every part of our lives. Slick advertising campaigns are designed for the express purpose of manipulating children into buying products and training them to become mindless consumers of goods they don't really want. The Nag factor, a marketing study that evaluated the effect of nagging, was designed to teach children how to nag more effectively. Consumers are made, not born. Segment from the multi-award winning documentary...

Originally posted by RetinoidReceptor
I don't think this card is targeting kids. Many teens and some adults like hello kitty. I don't think kids even know what credit cards are. If they did they wouldn't understand how to deal with them. They would just spend and think it was a gift

The video said it was by their own admission.

I totally agree - I hope Obama keeps his word on this. Credit cards are evil for anyone, and it is inhuman to get people addicted to them so early.

Originally posted by RetinoidReceptor
I don't think kids even know what credit cards are.

Long gone are the days of sending money or a gift certificate in a birthday card, now every store/product has a gift card, which usually translates into a kid going directly from birthday card to the internet to spend at will.

It's a digital age with digital currency... i think most kids are hip to this.

As we speak, i'm sure there are tweens with debt cards that are automatically loaded each week with an allowance, deposited directly from their parent's checking/savings account. Offering kids debit/credit cards seems to be the next natural progression. I can see the appeal of this to parents who need a convenient way to send money to their kid in boarding school and/or college.

If Hello Kittie also appeals to many adults, this is a great cover and opportunity for the credit card companies to do some ground breaking market research on manipulating the tween demographic.

[edit on 19-5-2009 by The All Seeing I]

reply to post by The All Seeing I


Exactly. The day my son was born I started an automatic debit order for his monthly allowance into his account. He had his own card too but of course I only gave it to him when he was older ... complete with 10 years of back-allowance. He was reasonably pleased

Don't forget to go after Milton Bradley for packaging Monopoly with little CC readers instead of fake cash. Those bastards.

The only person worth blaming is the idiot who ran up his bill.

The latest Federal Reserve report shows consumers kept spending on credit cards, even as confidence in the economy was faltering. Now credit card companies are wooing teenagers as young as 13.

Sharon Epperson, the personal finance correspondent for CNBC, talks with Renee Montagne about the buy-now-pay-later culture.

Credit card companies have created new products for teenagers specifically, saying they shouldn't be left out of the credit economy. What are these products?

There are special cards, like Visa Buxx cards, the Allow Card from MasterCard, that allow you to put a certain amount of money on a card for a teenager. So the parent is in the game with the teen. But this is a way so they are not just given a credit card, [but] for them to have some form of plastic that they can use to make purchases, almost like a gift card would work.

So it's a little like training wheels.

source: Credit Card Companies Woo Teens with Plastic

..."training wheels" to an early entry into slavery... choose your "Master/MasterCard"

Note: this coverage by NPR was 2 years before the bank bailouts... coincidence? So it takes the government to buy these banks to find out what they are up to? ... sorry but my math in this equation is producing some very erroneous totals/results.

Well, I do think it's good to have a way for teenagers to build credit. The only reason this is a negative thing is because of the way people look at credit cards; they should really be used for the convenience rather than like easy loans. It's not the credit card company's fault if you spend more than you can afford.

And in the end it's up to the parents anyways, because they're really the ones handling it.

I am under a strong impression that Credit cards intentionally target people, for instance my girlfriend. She has never had a loan to pay off, she has never had a job for more than 10$ an hour, and yet the other day she went to the bank to apply for a small credit card, she was hoping for 500$ so she could build some credit.

Sure enough, a week later, brand new spankin credit card in the mail for 8000$!!!! Enough to bury her in debt for the next several years.

Literally, if she spent half of each paycheck, it would take her well over a year to pay that off. Why would they send that to a person like her if they didn't want her to be completely hooped?