We Discovered a Family Secret!

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. What's going on, Tristan? Hey, George. How are y'all doing? We're doing great. How are you? I was, uh, the wisest redneck I know says better than I deserve. I'm glad Dave's not here to hear that. You might take wisest redneck. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, hey, I'm a defendant of many a redneck, so I'm right there. There you go, there you go. I love it. How can we help today? Yeah, so I'm in Baby Step 2 right now. I've got about $40,000 worth of debt that's mostly student loans. Shoot. Yeah, then I've got a car loan that I, well, I was recently driving around a brand new car, but I listened to Dave and sold that and got a cheaper car for the time being that I just owe about $5,000 on now. Okay, great. And, yeah, and so the only credit card that I have is one credit card that I really discovered about a year ago on Father's Day when my mom kind of unexpectedly passed away. Oh, man. And, yeah, and when me and my siblings were helping my dad go through everything and kind of try to get him sorted out because we knew our mom handled most of the finances, we actually had discovered that she had opened up, I think it was, 12 credit cards in his name and 11 in my name. Oh, my goodness. 11 cards in your name? Yeah. Hey, I'm sorry. That's tough. I mean, it's tough enough you lost your mom and then to discover a secret like that. That's painful. Yeah, it was rough for a little while, but thankfully I've got a, or at the time I had a wonderful girlfriend who helped me get through it, and now she's my fiance. Okay. So we're going to get married soon, but my main question is that 10 of the cards I showed them some information, reported a claim to them saying that these are fraudulent, and they were actually really helpful, immediately closed them out, reported them as fraudulent. Okay. And then there's just one card that initially told me that, oh, yeah, we're going to close this out in about a week, and then I found out a few months later that they had, in fact, not closed the card out and they had been charging me late fees, and it had been, yeah. Did you get it in writing that they were going to close it? Unfortunately, no. It was all over the phone. Yeah. And basically we've been going back and forth for about a year, and it turns out the thing that they are hanging on right now to keep it open is that when I was 18, my mom had bought me a plane ticket to go visit my older brother in California as like an early birthday present. Okay. And she apparently had done that on that credit card. There was a plane ticket in my name. Oh, so like, hey, this isn't fraud. What's the balance on it? What's the balance on the card? It was about $1,800, but after the late fees, now it's like $2,200. And so part of me is just kind of frustrated and just kind of wants to be like, okay, let me maybe just throw this in the debt snowball, but the other part of me is just like, I don't want to let this freaking credit card company win. What's your income? This year it's going to be $91,000. Okay. If I'm you, this has been a year of headache and hassle. You lost your mom. This is not what you want consuming your mental space. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't want to overstep, but the longer that you have to deal with this, I feel like it has the ability to kind of infiltrate what you're feeling about your mom even. Like she left me with this problem and now I mean, and it's just, I feel like that has, that can be a really tangled web and you can end up feeling like some bitterness or like some anger towards her when really all you want to do is just grieve your loss. Yeah. And I definitely felt that for the, for about the first six months after she passed and yeah, I went to went to therapy for it though. And so I, I really don't, yeah, that part I'm not really holding onto anymore. Cause she, she did what she did in her, in her mind. She thought she was doing what was, what was the best for us and us other kids. But yeah, so it, that I'm not too worried about. I'm just like, yeah. I'm still going to pay it. George, what would you do? I would call and say, listen, I'm done with this. Here's what I'm asking you to do. Just cut the late fees, cut this 400 bucks off. I'm happy to pay the original balance, but we've been fighting this thing. I didn't even know about this card. And so I'll work with you on this, but I'm paying my 1800 and that's it. And get that in writing and say, Hey, I'm closing the card after that. So that's what I would fight for, but I wouldn't fight to try to get it to zero over the next 10 years. Like Jade said, and just, it's too many brain calories. Yeah. Yeah. Over too small of an amount of money. Yeah. I agree with that. I, I second that notion, George. That's a good one. So sorry. I appreciate the call Tristan, but that is tough, man. You know, I hear about this all the time. Um, and this is not what happened in Tristan's situation, but for moms and dads listening, it is fraud. If you open up credit cards and the names of your children, like, and say that it's you that's fraud. And not only that, like you have the ability to really Jack their credit. I know people personally who this has been done to them. And then they hit 18 and they get into the world and they're 21 and 23. And they're like, why do I like, why is my credit already bad? Like what's happened to me? And they find out it's because their parents have opened up cards. You messed with your kid's financial life. And the other trend I'm seeing, Jade, I'm seeing all these videos on Instagram and Tik TOK. There's all this advice saying, Hey, add your kid as an authorized user on your card. Even if they're three years old, when they're 18, they're going to have amazing credit and they're going to be so grateful. And here's what happens. The parents blow up their kid's credit. Yeah. By accident. Yes. And then screw up their kid's financial life before they're even an adult. It's so unfair. It's so unfair. You've got to let your kids decide who they want to be financially. You don't, don't just set them out there and just assume what, cause what if they follow the Ramsey way and they don't want to have anything to do with credit and credit cards. What I could only hope, I could only dream that's the case, George. That's what we're hoping for. But you've got to be careful. And then there's another teaching in this George about, um, if you are a monitoring your own credit and making sure you see all the accounts on there, because this guy is talking about, he said there were 10 accounts, uh, 11 in his dad's name and then another 11 accounts in his name. Yeah. This is the importance. We are not for the credit score, but we are for pulling your credit report report once a year. You can do this on annualcreditreport.com. We have no affiliation. This is just the authorized federal website to do this for free. And that will show you every single trade line credit account you have open every single student loan, everything. It's going to lay it all out to give you a picture. And that's how I found out that fraud had happened to me. There was an AT&T account on a Verizon account opened across the country with a previous address of mine in Nashville that was opened and they added 1700 bucks worth of debt onto both of those accounts. And the only way I found that was pulling my credit report and getting a collector call saying, Hey, you owe us this money. I went, what? Yeah. I don't have Verizon. Yeah. So there you go. Something like that happened with Sam and I. It was a discover card. And he was like, I don't know what this is. I don't know what it came from. And yeah, check your credit score. Make sure you recognize the debt. And when you do pay it off.