Survey question

[jinasphinx]

What do you do to keep your financial information safe, and why?

Examples: never pay with physical checks because bank account number is in plaintext, not use online banking because of fear of hacking, shred all financial statements because of dumpster-divers, etc.

Comments

Re: oooh, a short answer test! I love those! :-)

[walkitout]

I am never _entirely_ certain what some of these words mean. When I say I pay bills online, what I mean is I sign up with the people I owe money to (like, Verizon, or the water company or a credit card company, or the State of Massachusetts Department of Revenue) and use their website. So it pulls money from either a credit card account or a checking account, depending on which I use in each particular case. I realize there are ways to make it work the other direction (you use a bank's website or whatever to send money out to various bills you owe), but I could never figure out how the hell to make that work.

As for safety, I did _not_ decide that it was safe to use, because that's an impossible determination to make. What I decided was that my legal liability in the event of something awful happening somewhere in the process was not different than if I paid by sending a check in the mail in response to a paper statement and attached bill (still owe the money, and if someone commits fraud, the account the money is coming from is on the hook for it, not me, as long as I am paying attention and appropriately notify the institution in the event of weird badness). I concluded that it was as easy or easier for me to make the payment AND pay attention for weird badness online as on paper (actually, def easier!), so the deciding factor was not safety (nothing is safe and the liability is identical) but rather ease of use. I'm happy to continue providing follow up information/opinion on this topic -- it's one of my favorites and few people are actually interested most of the time.

Re: oooh, a short answer test! I love those! :-)

[walkitout]

For example, here is USA Today coverage of the kind of bill pay that I never could figure out:

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2011-06-17-what-banks-dont-tell-you-about-automatic-bill-pay_n.htm

In fact, I am fairly certain that there are services that exist to help people figure out how to set up automatic bill pay.

And more, I assume about the same thing. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/your-money/why-dont-more-consumers-use-automatic-bill-pay

When I first moved across country, I set everything up with paperless statements and pay online through the vendor. I had actually forgotten I did this years later when I went to set a lot of this stuff up a second time; the original stuff had all reverted to paper due to vendor error, a bounced or delayed email, etc. Things don't revert to paper as readily any more, thank goddess.