Protect Your Identity

In yesterday’s blog I mentioned the importance of shredding all credit and loan offers with a cross cut shredder rather than just throwing those offers in the trash. Why is this so important? To protect your identity. For that matter, I go one step further and shred anything that has my name and/or address on it.

Credit and loan offers hold enough information for some unscrupulous person to use in a way that could damage your personal identity if found in the trash or improperly discarded.

Now I am not going to go through the specific details of how this could occur, that wouldn’t be wise as I would be helping out the bad guys. Here we want to protect you from the bad guys.

Now we all know the basics of protecting your identity. Shredding documents that contain personal information. Plus, you should never tell anyone your social security number, credit card number, or even the small little three digit code on the back of your credit card, that you have not determined is a valid representative of the account in question. All account and personal information should be kept as confidential as possible. I don’t tell anyone or even “verify” to anyone that information over the phone unless I have initiated the call myself and know who I am talking to.

So how do you protect your identity beyond that? Well start by opting out of credit offers as we discussed on Friday. Check your credit reports every year, you can do this by going to www.annualcreditreport.com which is a free service. Place a fraud alert at the credit bureaus every 90 days, this will prevent any new accounts from being open and require any new charges from occurring without your prior approval.

Now if you are like me, you probably have other more pressing priorities happening in your life that you are focusing on, such as your family, work, house repairs, car maintenance, etc., so even I will miss a 90 day mark in placing the fraud alerts at the credit bureaus or forget to pull a credit report. What I did instead is sign up for identity protection. I am so pleased with how easy it is, and how I no longer have to worry about it that I placed a link for LifeLock on our main page. Not only will they do all the above, but if after subscribing with them you find yourself in the situation of dealing with identity theft, they will do the leg work for you in clearing it up. This leg work could take hours upon hours of your time, police reports must be filed, letters must be written, all this on top of all your other worries, who has time to deal with that hassle? Not me.

Identity protection is like insurance plus. Not only to they step in after the fact (insurance) but they are also maintaining you on the front end (the plus part), by opting out for you, placing the fraud alerts, etc.

So yes, even though I could do all the leg work that LifeLock does myself, I think it is well worth the small cost to have them do it for me and give me peace of mind and one less thing to worry about.

Tags: , credit, identity theft, loans, Money, protection