Jill Russo Foster

Tips for Successful Personal Finances

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Financial Literacy Month – Tip #14

Mail

Here’s the tip from July 30 – Credit month:

Sounds simple enough, we use the mail all the time for legitimate purposes. But others don’t and you have to be aware and take precautions.

  • Don’t put your outgoing mail (especially bills) in your mailbox for someone to steal. Take it to an actual postal mailbox to mail.
  • Don’t bring your mail to work to be mailed. Many companies have the mail sitting on the counter for anyone to take. Again, take it to an actual postal mailbox to mail.
  • Don’t leave you incoming mail in the mail box all day for others to be able to grab. Talk to your Post Office about what you can do (locked mailbox, slot in your door etc). Maybe have your mail sent to a P O Box.
  • Look at your mail promptly. Did you get a declined credit offer when you haven’t applied for credit? It could be a sign that someone may be attempting to open a credit card in your name.

There are many ways to steal someone’s identity, don’t make it easy on them.

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Are You Going To Be A Victim of Fraud?

It’s said that everyone will be a victim of fraud at least once it their lifetime.  Yikes!

What steps are you taking to protect yourself?  While you can’t protect yourself 100%, you can take steps to lessen your chances or to catch it as fast as possible.  Don’t be an easy target.

Here are a few tips that we do in our household:

First, your mailbox.  Is your mail sitting in there all day or longer?  Do you put your outgoing mail in there with the flag up for?  All of these are easy targets to get your personal information.  In our house, we take all outgoing mail to the Post Office.  We pick up our incoming mail daily.  Less time for someone to take our bank or credit card statement with our information.

Next is your car.  Yes, you know your should lock it, but do you?  If you do, what are you leaving inside your car?  I just watched a video of people going to the gym and not carrying anything.  To me, that means they left their purse / wallet in their car.  Depending on the location, this can be an easy target for theft.  Are you shopping and putting your packages in the car and going to another store? Leaving your car unlocked or the window partial open can give someone easy access to your belongings.

What about your home?  Do you lock your home?  What do you toss out / recycle?  Think about your documents – can someone steal your identity by taking your trash.  We shred everything and you should too.  We also installed cameras to monitor our home.  What about your computer / cell phones?  What activities are you doing on them?  Are you always connected to a secure network?  Never do tasks such as viewing or paying bills when you are on pubic wifi.  Set up two factor authentication for your accounts.  Do each of your online accounts have there own user ID and password?  When was the last time you changed your passwords?  Monitor your bank and credit card accounts at least weekly to look for suspicious activity.  Monitor your credit report / score to anything suspicious.  Remember, the sooner you catch it, the less they can take.

To monitor your credit report, sign up for my newsletter at www.JillRussoFoster.com.  In addition to the newsletter, subscribers will be given a reminder email to view their credit report three times per year for free and it won’t hurt your credit score.

Another Data Breach – Was Your Information Compromised?

It happened again – this is NOT the first time and it won’t be the last!  Another data breach.  This time it’s Capital One!

So what should you do?

  1. When is the last time you changed your passwords?  Not only should you change them often, each account should have a different password.  Yes, you heard me – each one should be unique.  That way if someone gets your password, they won’t have access to all your accounts.
  2. When is the last time you checked your credit report and/or credit score?  You can monitor your own credit easily for free.
  3. If you are not planning on using your credit in the near future, freeze it.  Not only will they not be able to open an account, neither will you.  Remember to freeze all three credit reports.
  4. When is the last time you viewed your accounts?  Do you check them in between statements?  You should consider checking your accounts at least weekly.  The sooner you catch something, the easier it is to stop it.

Take some time to make a plan that works for you and do your research.  You may need to do other things to protect yourself. Here are some tips from AARP about the breach.

To be reminded to view your credit report three times a year, sign up for my newsletter and get a reminder email to check your credit report.

In One More Day

You have heard about all the security breaches – from major retail chain stores to credit bureaus and more.  You can’t turn on the news or read a newspaper without learning about another breach.

Because of this, I have always encouraged you to freeze your credit to lessen your changes of identity theft.  Well tomorrow is a big day for consumers.  Credit report freezes will become free – no more small fee to freeze your credit and another small fee to unfreeze – all this adds up.  As of tomorrow, September 21, 2018 and just after the one year anniversary of the Equifax breach, there will be no cost to freeze your credit.

Please remember that you will receive a PIN with your freeze.  You will need to keep this in a safe place, but not so safe that you forget where you put it to unfreeze your credit.

In addition, fraud alerts will now be available for 1 year (it was 90 days in the past).

Get out there and take advantage of the free credit freeze tomorrow!

Consider A Credit Freeze

With all the news lately (and previously), it seems that every day there is another breach.  And these are only the ones that make the news!

So what should you do:

  • Consider a credit freeze (yes, there is a cost involved)
  • Check your bank and credit card accounts frequently (in my opinion at least once a week)
  • Make sure your user ID and passwords are different – no two sites should be the same.  If this is too many to remember, consider a password mana ger.
  • If you have used one of these companies that have been breached, change your password, request a new credit card – be proactive.

Nothing is 100% foolproof, but taking theses steps can lessen your risk.

Take Time To Protect Your Identify Now

Well it happened again – this time EquiFax! This is not the first time nor will it be the last security breach.

Here are some suggestions that you may want to take to help to protect your identity:

•    Personally, I am not a fan of doing banking on my phone, so I don’t have these apps. But I do have many texts (one for each transaction) and this way, I can catch anything immediately. I will be adding my credit cards to this process.

•    In addition, I use two-step authentication for all my accounts. Having a code either texted or phoned to me to use to access my account.

•    Check your credit report. I am a firm believer of this and now even more so. If you need reminders to check your credit for free three times per year, sign up for my newsletter here and you will get email reminders to check your credit every four months.

•    Monitor your accounts. I typically check in a couple of times a month, both my bank and credit card accounts just to look for anything that I don’t recognize. If you don’t want to do this, make sure you reconcile your accounts monthly.

•    You may want to set up credit monitoring service and/or freeze your credit report. You can check out my article on Credit Freeze here.

•    Change your passwords regularly.They shouldn’t be easy to guess (use a combination of upper and lower case letters, number and symbols) and don’t you use the same password. Each account should have its’ own individual one.

Take the time now to protect your identity. It’s much easier to do this proactively than to deal with the turmoil of identity theft later.

Save

Save

Worried about your accounts being hijacked?

We personally view our bank and credit cards accounts weekly – we check for unrecognized transactions.  We use two step authentication. We don’t do this from our phones, only home computers.  You may think we are overly cautious, but here’s what CNBC has so say.

Identity Thieves Don’t Stop with the Living

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You know that I go to great lengths to protect myself from identity theft.  I do what I can from my end even though I have no control over corporate breaches.  Ugh!

But, there are others in my family who may be at risk.

Have you ever had a close family member pass away?  You probably said ‘yes’ to that question.  If so, you know that the family writes an obituary for the newspaper that includes a number personal details.  When I was the Executor for my father’s estate, I did that.  I even looked at the newspaper to see what information other families included to make sure I didn’t leave anything of importance out.

Well, that was mistake number #1.

I (like many others) handed a potential identity thief the information on a silver platter. I included his date of birth, where he grew up, the names of my mother and siblings, his past places of employment, and the organizations he was a part of.  I included everything everything but his social security number.

According to AARP, 2.5 million deceased people have their identity stolen postmortem each year.  This is wide spread and the victims can’t speak up, so it’s a win for the thief.

So what can you do about it?

  • Send death certificates to the three credit reporting agencies and request that a death alert be posted to the deceased credit report – I did this.
  • Contact the banks and investment companies with death certificates. See if you can get the accounts out of the deceased’s name.  In some states you can do this if the account was joint – I took care of this, too.
  • Notify the Social Security Administration, the IRS and Motor Vehicles – this is where I could have done more (partial mistake #2 – I did social security and the IRS but not motor vehicle).

Then, preventatively, check the deceased’s credit reports to monitor for any suspicious activity so you can catch it early on.  For more options, please go to my previous newsletter on reports available to consumers.

Hopefully, I won’t lose anyone close to me anytime soon, but from now on I will do ALL the steps – not just most.  I was somewhat lucky, as my father was collecting social security and had a government pension, so I notified both. It didn’t even occur to me to notify the DMV.  Learn from what I have done (and not done) to protect your loved ones.