You are a stay-at-home mom or dad, and you have been having trouble getting credit because you have no source of income other than the income of your spouse. And the Card Act of 2009 passed by Congress essentially told credit card companies that if someone has no income, they don’t deserve their own card. Is there help for you? Should there be?
Help is on the way
Yes, there is help. According to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, if you have access to your spouse’s money, you may be able to get your own card. What the credit card companies are looking for is how well you share: joint accounts or money transferred to the non-working spouse’s accounts from the working spouse.
The opinion on the PG article is that the Credit Card Act of 2009 had a “flaw” in that the card companies had to determine a non-working spouse’s eligibility for credit based on their independent income. Of course, there is no independent income in most of these circumstances if you are not working. So the non-working spouse was “penalized” by not being able to get their own credit, though it is common to have them as authorized users on the main account of the working spouse.
The credit debate
Is this really a penalty? Should someone with no independent income be allowed to have credit? Should the wage-earning spouse have to approve this? After all, if the wage-earning spouse doesn’t approve, where is the money supposed to come from to pay the credit card bills of the non-working spouse? Is this really a ploy by the credit card companies to extend credit to those who have no independent ability to pay so that the companies can get around income guidelines and suck more people into the dark side of credit?
Readers of the blog, let us know what you think.