Young phoners in debt

A lot of parents have been there: opened up a cell-phone provider's bill to find hundreds of dollars of charges staring them in the face. One example is the family of Chaz Albert, whose cell-phone bill last month was $400, $320 of it his charges, the New York Times reports. The real culprit: text messaging. At $.10 an outgoing message and $.02 for each incoming one, its cost is sneaking up on kids (and parents) everywhere, now that "texting" is all the rage in the US (it has been among European and Asian youth for years). The Times cites Forrester Research findings that "Americans sent 2.5 billion text messages a month in mid-2004, triple the number sent in mid-2002." The problem is, the cell phone companies' salespeople sometimes fail to tell new customers about the costs of texting. And what a lot of people don't know is, you can call up Customer Service and have them turn texting off altogether for any phone on your family plan. But if you want your kids to learn the hard way, the Times cites an upside: "For some young people, the cellphone ordeals, though painful, have proved valuable. What is left, it seems, after the bills are paid and the family tensions subside is the emergence of a new maturity when it comes to money." Not to mention some kids graduating from high school with cell-phone debt.