All The Stuff You Should Do... But Don't

It never fails to amaze me how often people have their identity stolen. Or how easy it can be for thieves to do.

Not long ago I was alerted by a company I do contract work for that their offices had been broken into and the computers- with all the personal information of thousands of people- were stolen.

Of course the computers were locked down and the information was encrypted but a good hacker (or possibly one of my daughters just hitting random keys) can break through that if given enough time.

The amount of stuff I had to do following that notice was, to put it mildly, a pain in the a$$. Yes, I used the dollar signs intentionally as it cost me a bit of money to do it all "properly", as the person at the credit bureau told me as he offered a monitoring system.

At that time lifelock wasn't available- at least I hadn't heard of it. If it had been available I would have used their services.

They set fraud protection on your credit bureau accounts. You can do this yourself, but the credit bureaus don't like to and if they do it they want you to buy a monitoring system which, to be quite honest, was a big waste of my money. Then, every 90 days (because fraud protection expires), lifelock will renew the fraud protection.

Also included in the service are: removal from junk mail & pre-approved credit offers, annual credit reports, their WalletLock™ service (if your wallet gets stolen) and a $1 million dollar guarantee.

Be honest, how often do you order your credit report? Or stop junk mail? Or watch you accounts for fraud? Yep, never, I know. I didn't even know I could do most of that- until I had to.

Trust me- don't wait until you have to.