San Diego Union-Tribune

Holidays are open season on military wallets
Small-print schemes, overspending common

By Rick Rogers
STAFF WRITER

December 12, 2005

Ever heard of a yo-yo sale or a 1995 Dodge Neon that costs $45,000?

Camp Pendleton's Maj. Daniel P. Harvey has. He's also heard of other schemes aimed at the pockets of service members living in San Diego County and elsewhere.

Financial inexperience, the angst of war and the holiday season are transforming the most wonderful time of the year into the most ruinous one for the enlisted and their families who skip the small print and spend blindly.

The overspending is often a desperate and sincere attempt to balance lives frayed by combat duty and pending deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, said Kate Somerville, a legal assistance attorney at the 32nd Street Naval Station.


Fighting back

People can learn about a company's licensing status and credentials by calling the toll-free hotline for California's Troops Against Predatory Scams program. The same phone number---(866) 275-2677---can be used to register complaints about questionable loans, fees and investments.

The program also offers free financial-planning advice at www.corp.ca.gov.
Early next year, thousands of San Diego-based Marines and Navy corpsmen ship out to the Middle East during the next major round of deployments. Nearly 300 Camp Pendleton Marines have died in Iraq since 2003, more than from any other U.S. base.

"A lot of (troops) are going through shock and depression, and what they are trying to do is to keep their families together by buying them things," Somerville said. "If they don't have the money, they are going to stretch their credit in an effort to please their families and to show love."

It's a theme repeated time after time across the country, said Catherine Williams, vice president for financial literacy at Money Management International, a nonprofit consumer counseling service in Chicago. "In a lot of cases, the Marine has been away a lot and the thought is: 'I've been gone so much and the wife has done such a great job of holding the family together. Boy, we really want to have a nice Christmas.' "

Williams said thankfulness for being alive and guilt at being away from home can produce an avalanche of Christmas debt.

Frequently, the result is a long and painful dig-out, said Paul Schumann, president of Vista's S&P Finance Corp. Schumann counseled Marines for a decade and what he saw sometimes made him wince, including car loans that carried interest rates reaching 30 percent.