Social Security Numbers on Savings Bonds
I found this piece from the Wall Street Journal regarding savings bonds and the SSN(s) that appear on them enlightening. You don’t need the SSN of the recipient of a gift of a savings bond in order to buy the bond. We recently ran into this situation when our son was born a couple of months ago.
One of my wife’s relatives wanted to continue a tradition of giving a savings bond to newborns in the family. But the message about her plans came through another relative who was vague about what was happening. This intermediary relative simply said she wanted to pass on our son’s SSN to a family member. Not knowing who or why, we were (understandably, I believe) reluctant to provide the SSN.
It turns out everything was above board and we got a savings bond in our son’s name the other day, courtesy my wife’s relative. A very nice gesture.
According to the WSJ article, Dept. of Treasury likely won’t reissue the bond if you want to change the SSN that appears on it. When the bond is cashed, the bank cashing it records the SSN of the named bearer and forwards that information on to the IRS so they can get paid, too.
One of the big reasons we didn’t want to disclose our son’s SSN was because he could be the victim of identity theft and we’d likely not know it for years. As I wrote before, stealing a minor’s identity is a particularly insidious form of identity theft. Since, unlike you and me, kids don’t regularly check their credit reports, the damage of an identity theft could be ongoing for years.
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:31 pm
[…] Finance wrote a couple important parenting/finance posts in the last week. First, did you know that you don’t need a child’s SSN to buy them a savings bond? Good news, because it keeps their ID safer. He also wrote about getting a savings account for his […]