What’s Your Password? – Protecting your online activity

Over the last few months we have tried to highlight several biases or habits we have that can impact our financial lives.  Today let’s discuss another habit many of us have that is putting our personal finances at risk.  Terrible, no good, very bad passwords.

If you’ll remember, around this time last year, we were coming off the disclosure by Equifax that they had compromised the personal information of about 147 Million people.  That headline grabbed a lot of attention and prompted us to start our own research into credit monitoring services.  What goes largely under-reported is that many times these data breaches are of our own doing through poor and redundant passwords.

We thought we could start with a little exercise.  Next to your computer, or in a home office, do you have post it notes stuck to a monitor filled with passwords?  What about a notebook detailing the passwords you created for every online account you have?  How many of them have a combination of dates of birth, names, home addresses, etc… in them?  We know you wouldn’t dare use one password for most of your online accounts, right?  Right?  If your password for your bank and your Facebook account are the same, please view this as your intervention!

Why do we do this?  Simply put, there is not a human being alive that can remember enough unique passwords to fill all the online profiles we currently live with.  In today’s day and age, it is almost impossible to not have at least a dozen.  That leads to the temptation to have the all-knowing, all-seeing, computer store them for you.  Problem solved you say.  But what if someone steals your computer we say?

So, what are we supposed to do?  Enter the online password managers.  These companies may have started to help you manage online profiles to a dozen shopping sites, social media profiles, and email accounts, but they have morphed into so much more.  At Daviman Financial we use LastPass, but there are now over a dozen high quality choices available that a simple google search of “password manager review” will pick up.  Here are a few of the things it helps us with:

• The program works as an add on extension to a browser or an app, so it works on any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone)
• A single master password is all that is needed to for you to remember and it can use 2-factor authentication for maximum protection (meaning they would need your password and your phone to get access)
• It allows you to store and categorize hundreds of passwords
• Generates secure passwords up to 100 (yes, we said 100) characters in length using upper case, lower case, numbers, letters, & special characters
• The parameters for creating passwords can be set to match the rules of the website
• The link to the log-in page is stored with the password so we can launch the site and log-in with one click
• You can share access to an account with someone else who has LastPass without them seeing your password…and revoke it at any time.
• You can add an emergency access person so that if you become incapacitated they can help you manage your affairs.  Once they request emergency access you have a specific time period to still reject their request in case someone tries to use it for something other than its intended purpose

Many of these services have family plans so everyone can use it for a discounted price.  Imagine having the family’s Netflix password set by you and only shared via a password manager with the kids (or other relative who is always piggybacking off your subscriptions).  Now imagine the power you would hold by being able to swiftly revoke access in a second from your phone… Or your spouse is trying to renew your vehicle registration online, but YOU set up the profile and have no idea what the password is…Or when you try to set up a profile on a website and it says “this email address is already in use”.  The power to remember, share, or un-share, access to your information can be extremely useful.