Jill Russo Foster

Tips for Successful Personal Finances

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Is A credit Freeze Right For You?

Here is Connecticut we have been experiencing a heat wave (although the weekend was great), we have another 90+ days ahead!

So in an effort to stay cool, let’s take about credit freezes.  Have you done this?

If you don’t plan on needing credit in the near future, you may want to consider this.  A credit freeze is one way to help protect your identity from being stolen.  You freeze your credit reports (yes, all three credit reports), so that no one can access your credit report (not even you) to open new accounts.

The reason why I say not needing your credit in the near future, is because there is a cost to freezing and unfreezing your credit report.  So if you have plans to open a new credit card, finance the purchase of a car, buy or refinance a home in the near future, this could be costly.

Here is a great article from AARP  walking you through the steps of a credit freeze.

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.

Have You Done This Yet?

What are you waiting for?

With the EquiFax breach and so many more, this is what you should do.  Jean Chatsky’s tips for freezing your credit.  Do this today!

Sing up for my newsletter, Money Choices and you will receive reminders three times per year to order your free credit report.

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

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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.