My kids are both in Europe this summer and using credit cards on our account. I check my bank info every day as a general habit and realized that since CC purchases hit immediately as pending I can see almost every place they are doing and seeing as it happens. ( occasionall snap chat posts confirm I’m seeing this in real time) Did they make it from the airport to London downtown ok, yep the coffee shop charge tells me they did. Oh look they made it across the Chunnel says the Musee d’orsay gift shop charge.
The funny thing is I though I was the only parent doing this. But at lunch today with 5 other moms With kids are abroad this summer, one person brought it up and everyone said they were doing it too. Nice to know I’m not the only seni- neurotic mom, avoiding driving my kid crazy by doing a work around constantly asking them how it’s going. Lol!
The find my iPhone app works just as easily. You can send a crazy loud notification when they refuse to call you back. Even better then stalking aka: helicoptering in via credit cards. P.s. I’ve only done this after many hours of the kiddo being late before my kiddo was eighteen. Never in Europe, that would be ridiculous.
I figure that it’s a fair exchange: The Bank of Mom pays for charges on our shared credit cards and the friendly face behind the Bank of Mom gets to know where her children have used the shared credit cards.
Also the cell phone bill and social media activity. It’s helpful when you’re feeling a little neurotic about their well-being and safety when they are traveling and they haven’t touched base for awhile. I consider it using the resources at hand.
Shared Credit cards are only shared if the adult child pays the shared bill, otherwise, they are a credit card that you gave them free reign to spend money without any obligation of the adult child to pay back. If you gave them freedom as adults to spend a certain amount of your money then you probably shouldn’t stalk your adult children.
@rosered55 , you are saying that if your adult “kids” wanted to keep their lives private they wouldn’t ask Mom to pay for it. That is great. It’s Your money , you should set the rules for the administration of your money to your adult kids. Do they know, you know, where they are, when they are spending your money?
I fully admit to credit card stalking when my kids traveled to Europe as middle schoolers, much less with high school groups and once or twice in college. S2 is currently getting his masters in the UK and I now rely on iMessage “read” receipts.
As a 20 year old who has his own credit card and is in college, my statements still reach my house obviously and my mom checks them to see why I spend 320$ on dunks and stuff like that, i dont mind, i pay for the credit card on my own btw so my parents know that, anything crazy i pay through cash :).
@doschicos, There is no harm no foul as long as the verbal contract between the Adult parent and adult child includes that, when the adult child spends the adult parents money, the parent will know by checking the card activity the same day and watch every movement on the same day the adult parent’s money was spent. The OP had it correct, Its stalking. If the Adult kids are okay with it, then who cares.
I don’t look daily, but I do look at the monthly bill carefully and ask D to explain anything that seems out of whack before I pay the bill. Fortunately she is pretty judicious.
I kind of agree with kiddo. It’s one thing to get a monthly statement and check for accuracy and just happen to notice where they are spending money. It’s another thing to track their movements in real time. I find that creepy, but whatever.
I have a friend who secretly put a tracking app on her adult son’s phone and would see how long he was in a girl’s apartment, etc. Just TMI for me. I can make myself crazy with the little bit of info I can glean from Facebook innocently, ie, logging on and seeing in the column on the right that my kids haven’t been on FB in 11 hours. What? Are they alive???
I really have always hated the argument “as long as it’s my money I can…” - sounds so distrusting! It may be your “business” but that’s not the way I want to do “business” with my kids!
I get it - checking to see if they have safely arrived at a destination, checking if you thought you would hear from them but didn’t - that kind of stuff. But tracking what they are eating for meals and such? Will you also ask them if they ate all their vegetables?
Not intended toward the OP necessarily - but “over stalkers” IMO.
Back in the days before smartphones, I was a basket case when S1 went to college. For his part, he asserted his independence with the non-communicative S stuff that is in many threads. I resorted to checking his online college dining bucks plan for buying pop. It got me through each day, figuring if he was buying Dr. Pepper, he was still alive
@ sryrstress Awe… now I feel guilty for not daily checking on my kiddo. I will really miss my Son next year. I hope he eats three meal each day. I did pay for unlimited!
OP here. Well let me first say I am on my bank website every day as a general habit and monitor my cc on that site daily. So the stalking is an incidental result of this habit. But my kids definitely kniw about it and don’t care at all. They appreciate the free reign on spending on this trip ( grad gift for one. 21 bday gift for the other)
But I was surprised how many people I knew did this.
We let son have access to our credit card to pay for grad school applications- knew somewhat where he applied because of that (some schools used a service so their name didn’t show on the bill). Also could keep tabs on using the card for things we did not expect- his explanation was a lack of cash at Subway a few times…
Based on my son’s responding to phone calls/emails I see nothing wrong with knowing a kid is alive by his spending of YOUR money. We finally got kid to change his checking account that had been linked to ours when he was a student- our statement included his balance (he kept a increasing his balance, frugal kid certainly did not spend his salary every month!).
I have a shared credit card with my D, but she has just graduated and went into the bank and got her first credit card.
I have a habit of checking my bank accounts and credit cards often because I have had strange things happen in the past. By checking my credit card, I pretty much know what my D is charging and where she’s been. I have not once called her out for doing anything… such as "where were you that you needed to use Lyft last weekend? although a Mom’s mind can go into overdrive trying to decipher.
When my D was studying abroad it became critical to watch the card. Suddenly one day two 1st class tickets from Paris to Yemen on KLM showed up on the credit card and I was on the phone to the bank immediately (BTW… the bank had already blocked the charge). She had card in hand, but someone had gotten her CC number while she was in France. She would have never noticed because she hasn’t developed the ‘credit card watchdog’ habits that I have.
don’t tell the kids.