Freeze your credit beyond ice! Credit: paalia/Flickr
The best way to prevent identity theft is to freeze your credit, a little known and little used tactic. The second is to chose a harder password (more on that below). I learned both these tips last week during a savvy-shopping summit hosted by ShopSmart magazine, which is published by Consumer Reports.
New York Times’ Ron Lieber, who writes the Your Money column, shared the first nugget. The good thing about freezing your credit, which is NOT the same as literally freezing your credit card in a block of water, is that no company can open an account in your name this way. (The exception is any company you already have an account with.) So if a criminal, or your next door neighbor, is trying to open an account in your name, no dice. A bank, mortgage lender, or other company won’t be able to
access your frozen account, disabling them from establishing a new line of credit.
The downside is that it costs about $20 to freeze it, and then it costs a little more money to thaw it. You can set a credit freeze online that takes place almost immediately at all three credit bureaus: set a credit freeze at Equifax, Experian, and Trans Union.
The second nugget comes from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who spoke at the ShopSmart summit.
“Chose harder passwords,” Bezos said. Your online bank might be super secure, but if you use the same password for a low-security site, criminals may get access to the weak site and use that password for sites that are harder to crack.
Do you use the same password for multiple sites?
Shhhhhheeeeyyyeeeeesss. (That’s me shushing you while admitting guilt.)
A good way to remember all those uber-difficult passwords you’re going to set is a smartphone app that save your passwords. Remember the password for the app, and up pop all your other passwords so you don’t have to remember them. Anybody got one to recommend?
Welcome to Bargain Babe! I’m Mara, and I’m so glad you’re here. I am an obsessive bargain hunter and penny pincher, and I am determined to live a full life without EVER paying full price. 
yes- I use and recommend 1Password – an awesome program!
http://agilebits.com/products/1Password
@J pie I’ve heard good things about 1Password!
I was using password software, when my hard drive died…and the back up program would not work…Thank goodness I have a note book that I save all online companies and passwords…I use a different passwords for every account and really long passwords for Amazon, banks, department stores, Online stores…I use short different passwords when I visit websites that i don’t buy from.
@William Do you carry the book with you? Are you worried about losing it? I worry that a pen-and-paper record of my passwords is not safe because I need my passwords when I travel.
I keep a printed out list of my passwords which is taped to an inside door on a cabinet. My passwords are derivations of a basic word that only I know which I never print out. So on my list the passwords might look like sta1n3ndar5d. Standard refers to the password only I know with numbers or characters added to it. So if my default password were encyclopedia, the above password would be enc1y3clop5edia.
@May Very sneaky. Sounds like you have incredibly secure passwords. Do you use the same one for every site? If you have multiples, how do you remember which password you used for each site?
I keep track of my passwords from the printed out list that I have taped to my cabinet. I don’t have EVERY password written down so another thing I do is to capture the page on the sites were you have to put in your answer to a security question such as “Which high school did you attend?” I never remember if I wrote just the name or added high school or HS to it so I just capture the image from my screen, print it out and file it the old fashioned way.