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.
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