“Luxury to me is not about buying expensive things;
it’s about living in a way where you appreciate things.”
(Oscar de la Renta)
In My Philosophy for Lifelong Work, I shared my financial philosophy, which includes using insurance to reduce the impact of unforeseen accidents and disasters.
My wife and I have all the traditional insurance policies — life, health care, homeowner, and vehicle — as well as long-term care insurance, an active homebuyer’s warranty, and LifeLock to protect against identity theft.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “Identity theft and identity fraud are terms used to refer to all types of crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.”1
Identity theft has flourished in this technological age. It poses a serious threat to everyone participating in the economy. A recent study reports there is a new identity theft victim every two seconds2 and a survey conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of LifeLock found 26 million US adults have been victim of identity theft in the past 12 months.
LifeLock helps protect my family against identity theft in three ways:
DETECT
My wife and I created profiles in the system with information about our bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, and personal identification. LifeLock uses advanced technology to continually monitor over a trillion data points every day looking for threats to our identities or accounts.
ALERT
In the event of suspicious activity, the system automatically notifies us by text, phone, or email. If we confirm the transaction is fraudulent, our LifeLock team jumps on it.
RESTORE
If we were to become a victim of a crime, LifeLock assigns a Restoration Specialist to handle every detail of our case and guide us through the process. These people know what to do, who to call, and who to hire to help recover our losses, and restore our name and credit.
LifeLock guarantees they will spend up to $1 million to hire experts to help our recovery and restoration. They are committed to resolving all crimes and debts that may be falsely created in our name.
OTHER STEPS
LifeLock published a helpful resource guide with additional steps to protect against identity theft. I am either using or planning to add these additional precautions:
- Adding a lock to our mailbox
- Have the post office hold our mail when we travel
- Use safe internet passwords with a unique combination of lower & uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols
- Set up a reminder to change our passwords every 3-4 months
- Use credit cards rather than debit cards
- Make sure our credit cards are swiped in our presence (learned this one the hard way!)
- Use a paper shredder for all personal, financial, or legal documents
- Keep our social security cards in our home safe
- Destroy the hard drive of any computer we may sell or throw out — beyond just erasing the hard drive, it should be physically destroyed
Together with our LifeLock policy in place, these steps provide me with peace-of-mind that we are proactively and diligently working to protect our personal wealth and reputation from this horrible crime.
Image via Death to the Stock Photo | Please note: this is not a sponsored post – I use LifeLock and believe it is a helpful way to protect against identity theft. Thank you for reading!