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Identity Theft: It Could Happen To You! Protect Yourself

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Identity theft is a serious and growing crime that inflicts serious damage on over 9 million people a year in the US alone. Identity theft can be placed on a par with break-in and robbery of an individual’s home in terms of psychological effects. The financial ramifications can be far more serious than the common burglary.

What is Identity Theft?

Identity theft involves the illegal use of a real person’s identity and financial standing to benefit an unscrupulous criminal. The Federal Trade Commission in the US says that over 40% of all complaints it receives relate the stolen personal and financial information.

Identity thieves use another person’s identity, to obtain credit in the form of credit cards, mortgages, store cards and every other conceivable line of credit. The average victim loses out to the June of over $6,000; some victims suffer much larger losses.

Identity Theft vs. Identity Borrowing

Financial identity theft is the act of stealing another person’s financial information such as bank records. This information is then used to obtain lines of credit and loans. They can also aid the criminal in obtaining forged checks, enabling them to raid the victims checking and savings accounts.

Identity cloning is slightly different in that it involves the duplication of the owner’s personal identity. The thief will then use the victim’s id to open bank accounts and lines of credit cards and mortgages. They may keep the assumed identity for long periods of time.

The thieves find their information through a multitude of ways including computer fraud. This can involve impersonating a large company or bank and asking the victim to sign in using their password to resolve some perceived problem with their account.

Less high-tech means of gaining information include rifling through trash to find credit card statements and other basic information gained from financial and non-financial correspondence.

How do you protect yourself?

To protect itself from these unscrupulous individuals and criminal gangs members of the public need to be constantly vigilant while online, avoiding giving away even minor personal information.

Shopping online, with companies that are not well known, is one particularly well exploited avenue for of obtaining all the information and ID thief needs.

Antivirus and firewall protection, combined with what is known as anti-phishing software and essential tools on all home computers.

To avoid ‘dumpster diving’ credit cards and other financial statements should be shredded before disposal. Credit cards and bank statements should be carefully checked for strange purchasers and other inconsistencies.

Any credit offer coming to the house in the form of junk mail should also be shredded as they often contain vital financial information. Within the home, personal and financial information should be hidden and safeguarded as if it were cash, and not just left out on the kitchen table.

Mail should be retrieved from the box as soon as possible to avoid theft of useful information. Unless you are very familiar with the company no credit card information, should have been given out over the phone.

What’s in your wallet? Money Meme

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Here’s a picture of my wallet as it is right now… It’s quite a bulky thing, but that’s probably because of all the crap I keep in it! I don’t usually carry it in my pocket! It’s in my bag most of the time.

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So, let’s see what is in it!

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One Taiwan ARC Card; two driving licenses; one car registration; two insurance cards (one already out of date); one bank account number (why?); a 2007 calendar; one NT$1000 bill; a National Health Insurance IC card; an MRT card (called EasyCard!); a CostCo Membership card; a Telephone Card (with IC); a Subway Customer Card (we have one near here!); a MasterCard and some ATM cards, none of which I use particularly often; and a NT$5 coin. That’s it. Oh, and I found an insurance sticker with a phone number that I SHOULD stick on my car window, but always forget to…

It was helpful, I threw out the old calendar, and reminded myself to renew my car registration; I also have to stick the Insurance Sticker on the window, just in case.

OK. So here goes: who’s going to follow me in this meme! Let’s see if Elizabeth at Table for Five will…!

Do mention in the meme: This meme was started by InvestorBlogger.

Christmas is coming: the three ‘C’s of a Succesful Holiday

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And they are: cheer, credit cards, and cost! If you match them well enough, your holiday should be great! If not, read on…

The timer at the top of my blog edges ever closer to December 25th, and with it the sense that Christmas shopping, a moment dreaded by almost every man I know, should begin! Yet this year, there are a lot of pressures on our wallets, perhaps more so than in many previous Christmases over the last ten years or so: inflation is ticking up, gasoline (and all energy prices) are rising, food prices are spiralling upwards, interest rates are rising, and many homeowners now face an ARM reset in early 2008.

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It’s my Christmas, and I’ll swipe if I want to

Given the increasing pressure on our regular spending, it’s very tempting to let our flexible friends bear the weight of the extra expense of Christmas, so that we can at least enjoy a ‘happy’ and ‘free’ Christmas… But InvestorBlogger is challenging you: How can your Christmas be ‘happy’ and ‘free’ when you know that come January, the charges will start appearing on your credit cards‘ statements as early as the end of the first week of January?

  1. Will you feel happy knowing that you have to pay more than 15% pa interest on goods, foods, and services that have long been consumed (and even forgotten!)?
  2. Will you feel free when you find that your paycheck has to be handed over to the bank to cover the minimum payments on ALL your credit cards, and it’s going to be months before the principal is paid off?

Well, I’m proposing that you can take five concrete steps towards acting before it’s too late. If you follow these, you will find it much easier to alleviate the January pressure, lighten the Christmas shopping burden, and improve your Christmas cheer!

1. Limit your purchases

Many parents, family members and friends do go overboard on purchasing presents. Of course, this is just not necessary. So if you find that you are buying lots of presents because you’re not sure what that person wants, then don’t. Have a good think about what that person is like and means to you, then purchase one or two presents at the very most that are of good quality, that exemplify your relationship, and that mean something.

One of the best presents I ever got from my parents was a simple ‘made in Taiwan’ plastic chess set (the pieces were large and easy to handle for a kid!), even though the chess set is long gone, the gift started me on a long journey to play Chess at school, and with friends. From there I learned a lot more wonderful board games, including backgammon, draughts, etc.. That simple plastic set was a much more valuable present to me than all of the fancy Evel Knievels, Action Men, and Meccano Sets that I received in all my years as a kid. One simple game, decades of satisfaction.

2. Limit your spending

Set large budgets for your shopping, and allow a little legroom so that you can overshoot your budget with out feeling bad. Typically when I’m shopping for a big ticket item, I’ll budget a base amount +/- 20%. In other words, if I want to buy a new TV, I’ll budget say $400 +/-$80. I’ll try to get the best TV I can around the $400 mark, but I won’t limit that to just $400, so if I see something that is quantifiably better for a little extra money, I won’t feel bad about it! I can buy. The important thing for me is the freedom to buy something better, but I feel secure enough knowing that there is a ‘hard’ limit to my spending as well as a soft limit.

3. Simplicity vs. Abundance

We all live in a world of things, too many things. We’re given things on many occasions, we spend too much time and money shopping, we’re even buying on the Internet now. Yet in this world of abundance, we’re often short of simplicity: simplicity in our relationships, simplicity in our lives and simplicity in our health.

Every box of cereal comes with 200 vitamins, every mobile phone can do 100 things, … What happened to a simple gift made to do one thing and do it well? So, if you are shopping, choose carefully, choose meditatively, choose simply.

4. Focus on the people, not the things!

In the US, Christmas is a time of celebration, a time of rejoicing. It isn’t an accident that it is preceded by Thanksgiving. If you are faced with a choice of buying a lot of things on credit cards or owning up to not feeling good about spending too much money on credit cards, tell people that you are just not able to spend that kind of money…! Instead, enjoy Christmas for what it should really be about…! Tell people that you’re going to enjoy Christmas because it’s a real chance to connect to people you care about…! If you find buying an abundance of things tough on your pocketbook, then look to making things for them, things that they will appreciate because you made them especiallly for them: your own calendars, postcards, T-shirts, plants, books… the list is quite endless. While the kids may want an X-Box, most adults really don’t.

5. Making the most of your ACTUAL spending

There are so many ways that you can utilize credit cards these to cut your expenses that it would, of course, be foolish to not use them. So, if you do use your credit cards, make sure that you get as much back as possible: typical benefits can include cash back on purchases from cash back credit cards, bonus points or airmiles, parking discounts, 0% interest periods, grace periods, balance transfers, store discounts, rebate points, etc. If you are applying for new credit cards before Christmas, or you have a bundle in your wallet already, you may want to compare credit cards carefully to get the best benefits! But remember, using a credit card to save money only really works if you were going to buy the item in the first place!

Whatever your shopping plans are this Christmas, I hope that all my readers have a happy holiday and that we welcome in a prosperous new year!

Your Christmas has been saved by natfinancecreditcards!