Veronica
“Dear Steve,
My son was stationed in Iraq a few years ago, and I had power of attorney. I took out a credit card in his name, with the intentions of establishing credit for him when he got out. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the debt remains unpaid, and my son is stuck with the bill. All I want is to have this debt transferred to my name, and off his credit. Please tell me there is a way to do this.
Can a credit card debt be transferred to someone else?
Veronica”
Dear Veronica,
Veronica, Veronica, Veronica. Why?
I understand your intentions here but I assume that since you want to get the debt off his card, you used it to make purchases for yourself that you can’t pay for.
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I am afraid that the only way out of this is to pay the debt in full or to apply for a new credit card or use a credit card in your name and do a balance transfer.
There is no way the bank will remove his name from the account. He was approved as the qualified account holder so the bank is not going to let him go once approved.
The only other ways to neutralize this debt is either your son makes payment arrangements, which you pay, he could go bankrupt or he could claim he had no knowledge of you taking out this card in his name and file criminal charges against you for identity theft.
As well intentioned as your game plan was, it was a horrible idea and a great burden to place on your son. Not to mention the trashing it gave his credit.
I suspect that there is a slight opportunity here that you could not qualify for a card yourself and applied for one in his name and used it to make purchases you could not afford to repay. Otherwise, if you were helping him, why wouldn’t any charges on the card be his or be yours that you paid off in the month that were charged.
I always say that there is no sense wasting a perfectly good mistake. Learn from it. The best outcome from this situation is that you follow one of my suggestions above and never ever do this again.
I feel my sister Teresa is being scammed by her live in Loser boyfriend James F. He has run up her credit card to the tune of 50k and more. He has recently told her he could get this debt removed from her name by having the credit card company that was issued in her name TRANSFERRED to his name and get her name removed from this debt by the transfer.
Can this be done? If so, how and what qualifications does the person need to have that the credit card debt is being transferred to?
Thanks, Tim Smith
Tim
Sorry to say, no. The only way I can think of is if he applied, was approved and then opened new accounts with the creditors and then did a balance transfer.
Steve
You are a much kinder person then I am… if a parent did that to me regardless of how much I loved them I would file criminal charges. You can argue that credit can be repaired with time but so can relationships. This just isn’t even close to legal and seems so low to me.
Ray,
It is a very unfortunate situation that I have seen many times over the years. The reality is that most people refuse to file criminal charges against family members and they get stuck with the debt. I’ve seen parents do it in the child’s name, children do it in the parents name and one case in particular was a women that applied for a lot of credit in the name of her father-in-law.
Steve