imroot.com

Step 2: As I said in my previous post, “Initial Fraud Alerts” are the next step in protecting your credit. This flags your accounts, so that if someone attempts to open a new account in your name extra identification will be required. If you are a person that likes to take advantage of those instant approval credit deals like “Buy now, no interest or payments until 2020″ this could make your life a little more difficult. When you place an initial fraud alert on your account you can also leave a phone number with them, which they should contact you on if someone tries to open a new account in your name. My research indicates that this does not negatively impact your credit scores in any way.

Each of the 3 credit reporting agencies maintains a phone number you can call to establish the fraud alert:

I set one up for myself and my wife, so I tried two of them so far (Experian and Transunion). I felt like Transunion’s version was a little easier to navigate, Experian kind of puts you through menu gymnastics to get it done.

You only have to notify one agency, they will notify the other two agencies on your behalf. An initial fraud alert is only good for 90 days, so you need to do this every 90 days, the upside, it takes only about 5 minutes per person, you could easily do it on your commute (another reason to like Transunion, they have speech recognition). I recommend adding an outlook recurring task to remind you to do this every 90 days.

Step 3: Monitor your credit report, after all it’s free.

Time spent on this step: 15 minutes.
Time spent so far: 45 minutes.

Identity theft is a reality. I have worked hard to keep my credit clean and don’t really want to loose it because of some looser who goes through my mail. I started looking at a few services like lifelock.com. Digging into it a little I found there are a lot of things you can do yourself, you just need to take the time to do it. If your don’t want to keep track of it, plunk down the $99 bucks for lifelock, but I wanted to do it for myself and my wife, so it was going to be $200. I figured I would try the DIY approach and see how much work it really is.

Step 1: The first place to start is to stop getting all the pre-approved credit card offers in the mail. A majority of these come from the credit reporting agencies, who sell your name to credit card companies. They have this nice little website that lets you opt out for 5 year, or permanently….its the law.

https://www.optoutprescreen.com

If you do a permanent opt-out be sure you PRINT OUT AND RETURN THE FORM. The link to do this is buried in the first paragraph. If you don’t print and mail it, they will set you up for a 5 year opt out instead of a permanent. If you do this at this one site, all of the agencies will be notified.

Step 2: Put “Fraud Alerts” on your reports with the leading credit agencies. More to come on that. I understand these have to be renewed once a quarter, but I bet it is easy, and outlook with make it easy to remember with a recurring task (also good for remembering important birthdays).

Time Spent So Far: 30 minutes.

So I found out today, I can’t vote in the primary on Tuesday.  I moved last year and somewhere in all of the paper shuffling, my voter registration didn’t get updated.  Even though I moved only 15 mintues from my old house, and my old polling place is only about 10 minutes from my new house I can’t go back there because I moved across county lines.  If you move across county lines, you are only elidgable to return to your old county for 30 days, then they cancel your old registration (probably in an effort to prevent fraud I would assume).

In any case, I won’t be able to vote on Tuesday, so someone else will have to write my name in.  I will definately get this straight before November.