Money

The other day, my daughter informed me that she was doing some serious budgeting for her upcoming trip to Florida (Disney cruise), and the long and short of it was that she needed funds.  She said I don't want to sound like the classic kid who says Oh, I'll just ask my parents for the money.  I assured her that she was not, and that I thought she had a good grasp of financial essentials.

As if to nail that one down, she called today and said Hey, I got this call, they said it was someone's fraud analysis department, and they wanted to know about this charge on your credit card for a hotel in Florida?  Well, as it happens, she does have access to my card, but she had not ordered anything -- so I called the credit card people and said hey, this isn''t valid, we object....and while I was talking, I noticed another charge on the card, for food from Jimmy Johns! So we objected to that, too.  I made sure to tell my daughter that she'd done exactly the right thing in her reaction to that call.

Odd, though.  I have one of the new credit cards -- the ones with a chip, but without a PIN?  Who would have guessed that the lack of a PIN might mean that someone could still hijack the card?  Clearly, not the people who issued my card!

(Though I do wonder -- how do you keep a card secure if its being used online? )