When Credit Should Be in a Husband’s Name
March 24, 2011
Karen I. writes:
I thought you might find this interesting. I saw it on a website called Dollar Stretcher, which is a good site for a housewife to visit now and then. I was shocked to see this. It is important for housewives to have a credit history of their own in case of the death of their spouse, and other emergency situations. This new law could make establishing credit much harder for housewives. Our government seems intent on making things as difficult as possible for us. And, as financial analyst Manisha Thankor says in the article, “It is tantamount to assigning a zero-dollar value to the work stay-at-home parents do day in and day out…”. Experts also say in the article that housewives are going to be “really stuck – unable to rent a car, buy an airline ticket or do anything that requires a credit card.” I don’t know about that because debit cards can be used as credit cards and it does not say housewives can’t be added to husbands’ cards as authorized users.
Maybe this is a good thing. I don’t know. I heard that housewives used to have to have the approval of their husband to get a credit card. It could keep a housewife from running up a lot of debt for her husband to pay. But, it won’t do a thing to stop working women from doing that.
Laura writes:
I think this new ruling makes sense. It doesn’t mean a non-working woman cannot have a credit card. It just has to be her husband’s account and she cannot apply for a new account on her own. With divorce laws as they are, this makes it a little less likely that a man will be left with credit card expenditures he never made or wanted. It won’t completely prevent that scenario, but it makes it less likely. Yes, you’re right; it won’t stop a working woman from wracking up enormous debt, but presumably she would be legally indebted because of her income in the event of divorce.
This ruling only implies a lack of value to a housewife’s labor in the monetary sense. That is correct. A housewife’s labor does not translate into hard currency. The ruling recognizes the unfairness of one person amassing enormous consumer debt for which another person may be held liable.
