Episode 142-Protect Your Financial Information: Essential Strategies to Secure Your Identity

Struggling to protect your financial information in a world of increasing data breaches? Discover simple yet powerful strategies to safeguard your identity in our latest episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less. I'm Stacey Hyde, your guide through the essential steps to locking your credit with TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian. Learn how this proactive measure can prevent unauthorized access to your financial data without hindering your ability to make major purchases. 

Join me as we explore the practical use of password managers, the critical role of multi-factor authentication, and real-life stories of identity theft. Stay ahead of hackers and protect your personal information with insights backed by the Wall Street Journal. Tune in for actionable advice and stay informed in this fast-evolving digital landscape.

Envision Financial Planning. 5100 Poplar Avenue, Suite 2428, Memphis TN 38137. (901) 422-7526, This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the United States. Advisory Services offered through Envision Financial Planning, a Registered Investment Adviser.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, I'm Stacey Hyde with Envision Financial Planning and we're back for another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 minutes or less. And, before you think, all we do is talk about how the bad guys are after you and protecting your account. We do talk about other things, but this is a topic that just keeps coming up with different clients, friends, so I wanted to talk a minute today about why you should, even if you haven't been one of the people who've been affected by the AT&T breach or any of the other data breaches. A big company that did background checks on behalf of the government was hacked, so now a lot of people's information is exposed, and it may actually be the worst one yet, because it has social security numbers and dates of birth and, potentially, driver's license numbers and really everything that anybody would need to impersonate you. So how do you protect yourself? The easiest way to protect yourself now it's not like you don't have to do anything, but the easiest way to protect yourself.

Speaker 1: 1:12

There's three big credit bureaus. There's TransUnion, equifax and Experian. You should go to each company's website and lock your credit. There is no charge for this. You will have to establish a username and a password and generally you'll get a pin, depending on the provider, and you just lock it down. What that means is you won't get any mailers that offer you a low interest credit card. If you're checking out at the Gap around Christmas time and they say would you like to apply for a credit card and save 10% today, when they go to and you say yes, when they go to put you through it, they're going to come back and it's going to be declined because your credit is locked. That's actually probably not a bad thing. You probably don't need that credit card anyway. People cannot get into your credit account, so no credit can be issued to you.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Now you may be saying, but Stacey, what if I need to buy a car or I'm going to buy a house? Well, in that situation you know it's coming. So ask your lender if you're buying a car and they're ask them who they use, like, for example, subaru uses chase. You could say, okay, which credit bureau do you use? Well, you would go, log in to your say it's Experian, your Experian account and unlock your credit for, say, 48 hours. Then you can shop, they can check your credit, pull it, you can get your loan and then you go on your merry way, but you haven't left it open for the bad guys to get in there and open a credit card in your name or, you know, buy a car in your name. Probably less likely to happen. But I did have a client who someone opened a Bank of America credit card in her name and ran up three thousand dollars worth of expenses, and so she's not going to be liable for that. But she's still having to go and do to get that all cleaned up and off her record and so she's good locking down. But in her case the horse was a bit out of the barn before she locked the door. So I would encourage you and actually the Wall Street Journal published an article on this last week about the importance of going ahead and preemptively locking down your credit.

Speaker 1: 3:45

It is important that you put those PIN numbers in the right spot to where you can get to them. If you use a password manager, you can create a note. You can save the username, password, pin on your password manager. Highly recommend that. One password is the one that I use.

Speaker 1: 4:03

I would not recommend LastPass, and if you use LastPass as a password manager, I would recommend that you choose and transfer that to another one and delete your account there. They have not been as secure as they should have been, so we are recommending that anyone who's used LastPass move away from there, because it is important, and also you want to make sure you have what's called multi-factor authentication on your any sort of financial accounts, whether it be your bank accounts, your credit card accounts and even, and especially, your email account. So if you have a gmail account, that should have multi-factor authentication to make sure that it's you, because that's where the hackers get a lot of their information is. They see you're getting emails from Fidelity about your account there. Well, they'll try to figure out what it is and if you've used the same password for your Gmail as you have on your fidelity, a lot of times they can figure out how to get in. So really be careful, be diligent.

Speaker 1: 5:12

Lock your credit. It will probably take you about an hour from start to finish, but it is time well spent and that is a lot less time than it will take you to clean it up if someone does steal your identity. So that's the takeaway for today Lock your credit, make sure that your spouse or partner does, and if you've got children who are 18 years or older, get them to do the same thing, because they may have you may have been proactive in helping them build good credit so that, as they were launched, they would be able to buy their first house, get their apartment, get a car. You don't want the bad guys to get a hold of their credit because, hey, they've got this great credit history and no utilization and somebody steals their data. So make sure that those you care about also go in and lock their credit. Thanks for tuning in. This has been another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 minutes or less.