Financial protection and sanity

[bdcochran]

Part of survival includes protection yourself financially and allocating your time.

This is what I have accomplished this year:
1. Sanity. I purchased an inexpensive AT&T phone. Most of the robocallers do so automatically. The people do not pick up the phone and dial.
My new system does the following. If a call starts to come in, the system identifies whether the person known to me. If so, no delay in the call coming through. If it is a new caller, my system will say that if the caller wants to reach me, the caller has to punch a button. This eliminates about 35 calls a day.

2. Financial. I have been hacked in the past.
The three credit reporting agencies will do the following for free:
a. your credit report can be frozen for any length of time you want. So, if someone asks for your information and you have not authorized it, no information will be given out.
b. I signed up for a better VPN service. Most services are very poor and do not answer questions. As far as the internet is concerned, I am in a different country where I speak the native language which is not English. Hackers don't know where I am and would have a hard time getting into my computer. Moreover, I have an masking identity.
c. Years ago, if I had known, I would have one email address for the financial institutions, another address for purchases and a third address for normal discussions. It is too late for me to do this. It would take weeks to get set up.

[Bmyers]

We have the credit monitor service with our credit locked. We had a credit card number stolen, a debit card number stolen, and one of the medical facilities we used got hacked and they got all our info. So, we went to credit locking and monitoring to prevent any stolen ID issues. So far, they have stopped several attempts, so it has paid off for us.

[Bob]

Again - given that the world is NOT going to end, only be disrupted for a bit - Financial preps are very important.

[Bmyers]

The closer I get to the retirement age, the more I read on the topic. I'm surprised how many people do nothing towards their retirement or even towards having an emergency fund. Dad and grandpa taught me from a young age that having that having two emergency funds were important. One that you could get to at whatever the time is and one that is making you money and available when you need it.

[tom mac]

1) my S-10 phone does this, only allows contacts to ring direct call to cellphone. House phone is answer machine only just in case ( the cells and home ring at same time via Optimum not many come thru )
2) Went thru stolen credit too... had locked info for 7 yrs, now contact first only...
3) Have 7 email addresses... can have 5 more. Each one is used for some category; friends/cc companies/other bills/ junk and filtered
4) Have vpn but not that good... its the one that comes with McAfee ... can toggle on/off as needed

In all I think my computer setup is pretty good, life is good, don't want anyone peeing on my game.

PS... use my credit card over debit when possible... I get points on my CC and it's safer. ( have 4 CCs and use them for different things only so it's easy to check the bill every month)