<$Wednesday, April 16, 2008$>
Is Lifelock worth it?
| I don't tend to worry too much about identity theft. It's possible that I don't worry enough. I take all the reasonable precautions--I shred everything with my personal or financial info on it before throwing it out, my passwords all contain numbers AND capitals AND lowercase and are sufficiently obscure terms that would be tough to crack even without the number/caps jiggety, I protect my PINpad during transactions like a straight-A student protects her test answers, I don't carry my social security card around with me--and so far, I've never had my identity stolen. So it would seem that what I'm doing works. But with all of the scary statistics and the alarmist media constantly carrying on about this problem, I sometimes wonder if, so far, we've just been lucky? I've also been hearing a lot lately about lifelock, which sounds like a good idea if, like me, you are an unpleasant combination of busy/hurried/tired/lazy/ADD and are perfectly happy to pay experts to do complicated things for you. $10 a month seems a pretty reasonable fee to set this and forget it and let other people worry about it for you. On the other hand, if you are (also like me) frugal and (SO not like me) have time on your hands, I don't think they do anything that you couldn't do yourself for free. My finances being what they are, I tend to opt for the latter; but really, I think it's a relief to know that, had I the funds, I would never have to take on this headache by myself. Labels: credit cards, financial planning, money management, organizing, product love, tools |
A great question. Much of what this product offers is a recurring 90 day fraud alert -- ie it resets it every 90 days. If you can remember to do this yourself, you can save the money. I compare other credit related products in the product review section at http://www.videocreditscore.com/category/product-reviews/