[00:00:00] Speaker A: Every few seconds in America, another family's name gets stolen and your kids are 50 times more likely to be targeted than you are, dad.
Your kids credit and future can be wrecked beyond recognition before they're old enough to drive.
If you're an Abrahamic father dedicated to protecting your household, this one's for you.
Run your home and your doe like a biblical boss. Hey guys. Welcome back to Abraham's Wallet. I'm Stephen, joined as usual by certified financial planner and my good friend Mark. And today we're talking about something that sounds only like a modern digital headache, but is actually ancient warrior kind of stuff. Identity theft and, and how a father protects his family from it. Before we get into that, Mark, what's the news? As we head into these summer months,
[00:01:00] Speaker B: we are gearing up for Texas already here. We're going to be rolling out in a couple weeks.
It's going to be a tight one because we've developed over the years of going to Texas every year some traditions and one of those is that we will stop in the town of Durango, Colorado.
We will eat the barbecue that they sell at that town and we will play at the putt putt course in that town.
But doing that and the schedule of my children is also going to mean the next day I need to make a 15 hour blitz from Durango all the way to Dallas. So hopefully we make it and don't fall asleep and drift off the road. I will be renting a vehicle that will have your favorite for feature, which is the cruise control that keeps you in the lane and the distance so it almost drives itself.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Ah, wonderful. Yes. I'm preparing for that drive myself coming from Cincinnati down to the Dallas area and my crew is once again going to stop at Mammoth Cave, the world's largest cave system.
We're going to do a tour on our way down.
What we're not going to do, which I hazarded years ago with my family, is spend the night the night before at Mammoth Cave. And that was notable because I took a picture with my phone in our little cabin. Oh, it's a rustic cabin for the summer, wasn't it was over 100 degrees at midnight inside the cabin. My family did not love me that night, but it made a memory. Boy, oh boy, we all remember that.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I can't believe you stuck it out.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: It was horrible, man. And I was just trying to think of what, what, how do we, how do we save this? I mean, I was thinking we don't want to just go driving around going, we got to figure out some hotel, somewhere to go because we had a tour scheduled the next morning, first thing. So what?
The only thing I could figure to do was I went and found a Walmart within, I don't know, 20 minutes and just bought a whole bunch of box fans.
So it was a windy 100 degrees inside. I mean, you know, whatever.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: I remember one night in Texas as a high school student when we had camped out next to the Guadalupe. We were going to float on tubes the next day.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Here in Utah, it can be 106 degrees and yet it will always be 68 by evening time, even on those hot days. That's not true in Texas. It sounds like it's not true at Mammoth Caves.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So we were suffering intense similarly.
And I won't, because I know despite our warnings, we do have women that listen to this. I won't go into details, but I will say, oh, thank you. We obtained large bags of ice and just put them on the parts of us that would be most receptive to cooling off in our sleeping bags. And I slept with ice bags all over myself. Weird. And it helped. So next time, Steve, if you find yourself back at the Mammoth Cabins, consider just a strategically placed bag of ice.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Okay, well, are you ready to get into identity theft?
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Let's do it.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Okay. Now, Mark's going to give us all of the. All the details and give you some really smart moves. But I first want to talk about why this matters to every Abrahamic dad.
So your name is a lot more than one of many data fields on your driver's license. It's the legacy that you hand to your sons and daughters. Proverbs 22:1 says it nice and plain. A good name is more desirable than great riches.
And to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.
When that name is stolen and ruined, it's not just money that disappears, although it is that. It's time. Peace, trust. And sometimes the very future you're trying to build for your children. The numbers on this subject are brutal. Over a million identity theft cases hit the United States last year. And kids are especially vulnerable. One in 50 children will become victims this year.
What that means is their ivory clean credit histories become the perfect target. And their stolen identities can go undetected for years.
Little anecdote about a girl named Axton Hamilton.
Starting when she was just 11, her identity was stolen. With debt piling onto her name, her credit score plummeting to 380. She didn't know that any of this was going on. When she got Old enough to need credit, she couldn't get loans, she couldn't rent apartment. She couldn't get basic credit opportunities without explaining the mess that she didn't create. It took years of discovery to begin clearing her name, and she wrote a book about it.
That's what thieves do. They don't just steal money. They hijack the good name that we're called to protect and pass on to our kids. So it's a big deal trying to protect this name in every way. I think scripture shows us a couple of examples of this pattern. In Nehemiah 4, the men rebuilding the walls hear these words. Remember the Lord who is great and awesome and fight for your families, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes. And that is a very reasonable and godly motivation for a man to fight is how do I protect my family? Abraham did the same thing. We often talk about this story that when raiders took away his nephew Lot, he armed his household and he went after what belonged to his family. That protective instinct is still on us today. Every godly man feels it with regards to his family. And so Mark's going to walk us through exactly what a father can do to guard the household name in the digital age. So, Mark, I want you to start by telling us what happened on your radar to kind of alert you to the present need of this topic.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Well, I feel like there's been a few episodes recently where I've said, I got a question from a client, and I didn't know the ins and outs, and I did a bunch of research, and I ended up with a whole page of here's the moves.
That's what happened. This time I got a question from a client who's also, I believe, a pretty faithful Abraham's wallet listener. So they'll hear this and go, we caused the whole Abrahamic nation to take steps to secure their own identities.
And so that's kind of where we started.
I remember very clearly the first time I bumped into this issue myself. I was a newlywed, and I got a call from my bank, and they said, hey, quit trying to take money out of your bank account. It's empty. And you keep putting your card in the ATM and trying to pull money out. And I said, what are you talking about? My account can't be empty. I just got paid. And they said, no, we have pictures of you right here taking money out of. It's in the atm. There's a camera and there's a large black man taking cash out of the atm until evidently, it was Empty. And I said, that doesn't look like me.
And so there. I think everybody is going to bump into fraud, identity theft, some form of hacking, whatever it is. And it's, it's easy to not think about it. It's also not that hard to get ripped off by people who say they can help you with this. That can't. So my goal today was to give you some mostly maybe a hundred percent free steps. We're not here to recommend a service. That was actually part of the genesis of that conversation I had with the client and is they said, you know, Dave Ramsey, Ramsey recommends XYZ service.
And so we've been using it. What do you think? And I mean, maybe, Steve, we need to get more of these big, big businesses online to pay us money to recommend their services. I don't know.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: The only, the only sponsor we've had recently is, is Joe's Pickleball Court.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: And I don't think he paid us anything. I think we just really liked his business. So we're not really on our A game when it comes to the sponsorships, but there are a lot of people out there that will take your money and say they're protecting you. And what they're going to do, best case is exactly the things I'm going to tell you how to do today for free.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Great.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: The easiest thing you can do, whenever somebody goes to steal your identity, maybe they grab a piece of mail and they get some personally identifying information off of it, or they're, they're out to defraud you somehow and pretend they are you so that they can benefit financially.
Usually that's going to hit credit bureaus. So whether somebody is applying for new debt, they want to open a credit card, they want to open an, you know, any kind of financial account, that financial institution is going to ping one of the three or more than one of the three credit monitoring credit bureaus and they're going to say, is this person worthy of extending credit to.
You can freeze your credit at all three of these bureaus. So the bureau will respond and go, absolutely not. You cannot open that account and that is free to do so for you.
This prevents new accounts from being opened in your name. A lot of the paid services, they only monitor, so they will alert you and go, someone opened an account in your name.
Well, that's better than not knowing, I suppose, but it's better if we can just block the door and nobody can come through it. So how you do this, it's free at all three bureaus, it takes about 10 minutes per bureau to do. The three bureaus are called Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
And if you just search Credit Freeze at all three, you'll find them.
You can call them and do it on the phone or you. It's equifax.com personal credit services freeze. The other ones are way easier. It's just slash credit freeze.
But you can go in here, and this doesn't stop you from building credit. So if you've got a student loan and you're paying on that monthly, they still get those reports. And your credit score can keep going up. But if somebody tries to open a new account, that will stop it. And it. If you're thinking, well, I might need to buy a car in a year, so I might need these credit reports, no problem. It's even faster to unfreeze it than it is to freeze it. So you shouldn't have any issue freezing this. And you can do that for every adult in your house. Now you can also, like you said, Steve, more and more, the biggest victims of identity theft, especially when it comes to credit fraud, are children.
And you can do this for your kids too. It's a little bit more difficult. So you have to do it for minors. They have to be under 18. If they are over 18, they have to do it themselves. And they can create an account and do it online like we just talked about. But if you're going to do it for a kid, it has to be by mail, not online. And it requires a copy of birth certificate, a copy of the Social Security card, a copy of your driver's license, and proof fraud alert for freezing the credit of a child or the child.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Gotcha. And honestly, it's going to take you an hour to do all three. You can do them all at the same time. They basically take all the same information, make three copies of all things, put it in an envelope, go to the credit sites, go ask your AI or Google, what address do I send these to? Make sure you don't send it to the wrong address. Verify that you're. You're mailing this to the right place. Because if I was a scammer, maybe I would just create a fake website that said, here's how you freeze your kids credit reports. Send me all your information, all your details.
But you send that in and now your child's credit is frozen. And that's especially valuable because, yeah, it would be a pain if they needed credit, but the odds that your child is going to need credit before maybe it's time to apply for a student loan when they go off to college very low. So I think it's worth doing. And it really locks the door for somebody to come in and start opening fraudulent accounts in your child's name.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Okay, I, I'm, I'm interested. Yeah, that sounds very reasonable. It. I'm interested in you explaining to me what these companies do that say they're going to protect you from fraud and credit, you know, whatever.
What are they doing that's different than that?
[00:14:26] Speaker B: So typically what they'll do is monitoring. So all three of those credit reporting bureaus, you can pay additional and get monitoring. I think I have a credit card like an American Express or something that includes it. So I get a regular report from one of them where they say, here's what's happened in your credit, and it'll send me alerts. Hey, your credit balance just increased or decreased or your credit score went up or down. Now, I don't care too much about that because I don't need a lot of credit. But if I was trying to build my credit score, let's say I was just starting out and I had a 650 and I was trying to get to a 800, that would be good information.
You can get that pretty inexpensively directly from the credit agencies. But there are services that will kind of bundle a bunch of these things together and they'll be one stop shopping and say, we will alert you when these things happen. I just don't think it's worth as much as completely stopping things from happening that would be concerning to you.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to ask a related question, but a little off topic, which is about credit.
I'm thinking of a young guy that I was working with this week. He's newly married, and he's doing exactly what you described, trying to build his credit and get his score up.
Do you know if. Okay, let's say you get a credit card with a $5,000 limit and you pay it faithfully for a year and you get something in the mail that goes, hey, good news, we can expand your credit line up to $25,000.
Is that a good move for somebody to do if they're trying to build their credit to say, yeah, give me the bigger hunk of, of possibility, not that they're going to spend any more foolishly than they did, but give me the larger line. Is that good for somebody's credit score?
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
Yes is generally the answer. So if you're trying to build your credit score. One of the big things that they look at when they calculate your score is something called credit utilization.
And that means of all the credit you've got, how much are you using?
And maybe counterintuitively, zero is a knock on your score. So right now I have a home equity line of credit. I'm not using it if that was my only debt. So I've got, and I've got my credit cards, let's say I just had paid them off and I've got this home equity line of credit. I've got quite a bit of money that there are in institutions out there going, we're willing to give you money on credit.
And If I'm using 0 of it, that's a little bit of a hit. It's not a huge hit. So I wouldn't say you have to go out and borrow against those accounts if you've got them. Most people, if they have a credit card though, they're using some of it. But the ideal zone for credit utilization is between 1 and 9%.
Which means if you can get, if you spend a thousand bucks a month on a credit card, well, if they'll give you a hundred thousand dollar limit, that's great. And this can, can apply across all your credit cards. So let's say you're Steve Emanuel. You saw that they're offering 6,000 Starbucks points this year to open a credit card at Starbucks. You open it, you never use it. Maybe you do, I don't know, maybe you had to to get the bonus, but you're not using it. Well, that's actually helping your total credit. As long as you're using a little bit of it, you'll be in good shape. Where you really get in trouble is when you start 10 to 30%. So the next bucket up. So I'm using 25% of what they'll give me. It's not as good, but it's okay.
You can, you can still have a very good credit score and even get the top rates when you're applying for loans. With that kind of credit utilization over 30%, we start to, to actually see our score declining notably. And if you're using 70% of what is available to you, your credit score stinks, most likely.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
So, so to put that on the playing field, if you have a heloc, this home equity line of credit, it's based on the equity you have in your home and you typically they sell those, you know, you could get a $50,000 HELOC on your house so that you can do home improvement projects. Let's say you're actually doing that. Let's say you're rewiring your tree house and you're making it an amazing studio office space.
Okay, so let's say you're spending some of that money. What you're saying is we want to. You want to spin that baby down as soon as possible because it's part of the overall picture of your. Of your credit limit, the allowances that are available to you because you want to get. Ideally, you want to get under that 10% number, right?
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Okay. You're reminding me of as you're talking is a.
A little post that I saw this week where somebody was grousing about credit cards in general.
Credit cards are a scam. Nobody should be using credit cards.
They. They charge 25% interest.
Why would you ever do that? Et cetera.
And I just want to tell our people, I don't think they hear this from us often enough. Credit cards are a wonderful invention. What they are is a bet by a company that you're going to be irresponsible.
So they think if we extend you some credit, let's say you get $5,000 handed to you and you're 21 years old. What I could use $5,000 on this credit card. Oh, man. What I would buy for myself.
That's what an irresponsible person does. The responsible person goes, aha. There's somebody out there in the world, Discover famously does this on college campuses. They're willing to take a bet on me being irresponsible.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Aha.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: There's an opportunity. I'm going to prove to every financial institution under the sun that I am responsible, that I'm one of the unusual ones, and I'm not going to run this thing up to its max. I'm going to roll it like I spend $75 a month on. On eating out with this credit card. I get my 2% with my Discover card, and I pay it off at the end of every month. And you are not playing the game that the credit card companies hope that you play where you just get underneath a mound of credit. You're paying it off, and you're displaying to everyone. Oh, no, no, no.
I'm the exception to the rule, and I win this bet. And what happens, Mark, you know this. But what happens is if you can stay inside that window that you're describing, more and more companies will say, well, we. We. We would be happy to give you a loan. You seem Very responsible.
And your opportunity for spending goes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you're not pulled off sides by any of it because you see, oh, there's benefits that can come my way. As you're describing, credit cards will give you all of these side benefits because they think they're going to tantalize you into acting foolishly. But of course, the Abrahamic dude likes having the opportunities to have credit opportunities so that he can take advantage of them. Anyhow, just a little note about credit cards and credit scores, that they're all part of the same world.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yep. And to put a bow on that, the biggest component of your credit score is your payment history. Kind of. Obviously, if you don't pay what you owe on time, that will start to quickly degrade your credit score. But this credit utilization piece is the second biggest. It's 30% of your credit score. So it's meaningful.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: It's.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: And then after that, just FYI, another piece that's pretty important to the score is how long you've had accounts open.
So that's why we don't recommend just cycling through credit cards and opening and closing them all the time. I have a credit card that is sitting in my desk drawer. I haven't used it in 10 years.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: But I think it was opened when I was 14 by my parents for this very reason, to start building credit history for me. So anyways, we could do a whole episode on credit score. We're not. What we're going to tell you now is the next free thing you can do to protect your family from identity theft, and that is to lock down your accounts. Now, back in the day when I was describing, I didn't know that anything had happened to my bank card because I didn't. I wasn't online looking at my bank statement very frequently. They had to call me. Now, every credit card and bank account and everything, they've got an app, it's on my phone. I've got a budget software, Monarch Money that plugs in and I look at the transactions that go through there. So I know pretty quickly if something weird is happening on any of my accounts. And I even get alerts. So I get transaction alerts on my American Express card. If something over, I think $500 gets spent, I get a notification that says, hey, just FYI, this is happening. And thankfully, most credit card companies, and increasingly most debit card companies as well now will say, you're not on the hook if this is fraud. So they actually offer some protection.
But just knowing can Allow you to take action much more quickly than if somebody ran up the entire limit of your credit card and you had to unwind all that.
And so I think just connecting your accounts as much as possible, you don't need to get alerts every single time a transaction happens, but set a limit and say alert me if something over this amount happens and then do put eyes on the transactions. Whether that's again through a budgeting software or through just looking at your credit card transaction history more than once a month, I think it is worthwhile.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: So when you say lock down accounts, you just mean stay aware of the activity.
There's not a function called locking down an account.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: There's three things in this lockdown accounts bucket. One is turn on the notifications.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Okay, okay.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Two passwords. For so long I used the password that I had in my college email for everything.
And it became very clear when I don't know what got hacked, but something got hacked and I thought, oh my goodness, everything is the same password now. I use a software called 1Password and I love it. I love it so much because my wife still I'm working on training her in one password because every time she goes to log into something, what's a password for this? I lovingly, she would probably not agree. Sometimes she's like, you're not very nice when you say that. But I try to say you need to go try to use the software now because I we have a 30 digit numbers, letters, totally random thing that's our password and it's unique for every single thing we've ever logged into. It's all stored there. There's a way to recover it in the event that something got damaged on our devices. So I like that one. There's other password managers.
Bitwarden is one that's free and gets good reviews. But whatever you use, do not reuse passwords. Make sure they're complex and there's so many tools out there now that will make this very easy. So password security is a big deal.
And the last, the last one is kind of goes along with that. It's just two factor authentication. So it's a bit of a pain in the butt when you log in.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Hate it, hate it.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: But it's meaningful. So we manage tens and tens of millions of dollars for people and they don't allow me to log into the software I use to manage all these people's money and just have a nice little password. They say no, they I have to have this time based multiple devices that sync up and they Tell me a code and I log in. So financial institutions, when there's a lot of money at stake, take this stuff very seriously. You should, too.
So enable Two Factor Authentication. If you can use an authenticator app, good Google Authenticator is better than just getting a text message.
And if you don't do this, then somebody gets a hold of your email all of a sudden. If it's just, hey, we're sending a code to your email for you to log in. Now they've got the ability to log into almost everything. They can reset passwords. They can do all of that. If you have Two Factor authentication on it means, let's say somebody does break into your email, they still can't get into your bank account. Whereas if you don't have it, they get your email. They got most everything.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: So when. So when Gmail or ebay or whoever throws it out there to you, we see that you don't have Two Factor Authentication on. Would you like this? We should always say yes.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: Yes. You should always say yes.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm the worst on this subject. And I. Oh, I know.
I typically think like, oh, somebody's going to break into my Tropical Smoothie Cafe account. Oh, boy, oh, boy. But then I don't think, well, wait, did you ever give your credit card to Tropical Smoothie Cafe? Well, then it's on your account. So someone breaking into that would be a bad, bad thing. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's good.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Good note, right, next, this one's quick and easy. Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN so anyone in your household can request it for
[email protected] identity protection pin. It's a long URL, but if you Google that, you'll find it and it prevents anyone from filing a fraudulent return in your name. And that might sound crazy, but this is common. People will file a tax return in your name.
It's fake.
I had this happen to a client.
They. They said, we went to file our taxes, and the IRS said, you already filed a tax return and we sent you a huge refund.
Nope, that wasn't me. So somebody was using my Social Security number. File a fake tax return. You can prevent that really easily by just having a Identity Protection pin. You keep that in a safe place, and then nobody can file a tax return without it. And it's very hard. It's much harder for them to do this particular type of fraud if that's set up than if it isn't.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Okay, that's a really good one. Did not know that.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Another one that's less frequent, but extraordinarily painful. You might have heard this where people are just living in their house and then they get alerted. You don't own your house anymore because someone has committed title fraud.
Is home title fraud where somebody records a deed that is fraudulent on your house. And this can create. Even if you're totally in the right, I promise you, you're going to spend money on lawyers if this happens.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: I don't know if this is true of every county.
I don't know if this is true in Iola, Texas, where the manual routes are really small towns. But I've looked at some pretty small counties and so far all that I have examined. The county recorder offers a free title alert. So you can go to the county recorder's website and sign up for a free records notification and you'll get an email if any document is filed on your property's tax id.
And what this does is it doesn't kind of. This is. This is going back to the alerts versus block.
Right now there's no way to just block it and say nobody's allowed to record any information on this house, but it will at least give you instant notification if something's up.
And it's free, you can monitor usually a whole bunch of properties. So if you have multiple properties, you're probably at higher risk for this type of fraud. If you own a bunch of rental homes or something.
And it does, like I said, doesn't prevent the fraudulent deed from being recorded, but you will be able to dispute it very quickly. And again, free way to protect yourself against one of the bigger headaches that exists on God's earth.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: So that's. That is any county where you have deeded property.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: Correct. And I guess because you have deeded property out in Iola, we might find out the answer to whether they offer this service pretty soon. Okay, next we going back to credit here. There is a website that the I think the federal government helped create a long time ago called annualcreditreport.com and you can go there and you can sign up for credit monitoring for free. Again, this is one of those things that companies will say if you pay US$20 a month, we'll give you free credit monitoring. Well, it's already free, guys. You can sign
[email protected] once a year. You can pull all of your credit report and look and see who, who pinged my credit, who was checking on me. Is there anything on here that doesn't look right? That would be an Alert that maybe we need to lock things down a little bit more, even if they didn't end up getting an account opened in your name or something like that. But it'll also send you. This must be what I did why I get those weekly emails. Because it says in my notes here that we get free weekly access to all three credit reports and an alert when something changes. So this is really easy and it's really, it's high value. So annualcreditreport.com one note if you do this is that there are fake annual credit report websites. I don't think, I don't think on the front page of Google you're going to get something that's out to steal your info. But what it will do is, is it will charge you for the access to what's already free. So make sure you're going to the legitannualcreditreport.com site.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: I'll just throw out on annualcreditreport.com that you could pull your credit report. You could also, if your children have Social Security numbers, you could pull their credit report and just make sure that you're not like the girl in our example who's, who's secretly having her identity stolen and having tens of thousands of dollars stuck on, on top of their name. So that's just a little heads up.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: How often, Steve, do you get one of the. We always joke when the mail comes and I say, oh honey, they're offering us a $50,000 credit limit on a new credit card and we're pre approved and we all.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Yeah, weekly. Weekly.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Did you know that you can go to another federally run website called opt outprescreen.com no, I didn't.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: I'm writing it down and you can
[00:33:56] Speaker B: opt out of all of those. And those are actually kind of dangerous because I have a, I kept getting my mail stolen so I bought this Fort Knox mailbox that weighs like 50 pounds and locks up. But you know, if you just have a regular old mailbox, somebody can go to your mailbox, grab one of those, find, fill it out, say that they live somewhere else and a credit card will be mailed to them. Most likely that especially if you haven't locked down that credit report, the credit card will be mailed to them that they can use and it's on your dime. So it's better to opt out of those. Go to optout prescreened.com that will stop all pre screened credit offers. And again they're pre screened.
So what I just said was not totally correct. They're not going to hit your credit report and check they've already done it or they believe for one reason or another that you have good enough credit.
My mother in law had somebody open a credit card in her name from the sporting goods store Shields.
And she went in, she had a, she had a bee in her bonnet. She's like, how did this happen? She went into, they always have a little booth there to open a credit card. And she talked to the person and she said, well, how did somebody get my info? They said, we don't require a Social Security number to open a. Wow. Credit card here.
And that blew my mind. But there are companies out there that will open a credit card and just hope they can collect.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Okay.
We're rounding third here and coming home. Just a couple other tips. I've got this fancy shredder next to me. I think a good shredder is a valuable investment for just.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: I was just about to ask you that with your very first point. Go, go ahead.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so I, I don't know, I. It's an Amazon basics shredder. It's not anything super. I mean I think it cost a, a bit of money, but chops my documents into a bazillion pieces because here I'm not only dealing with my own personal sensitive info, I've got client info that I need to make sure doesn't fall into the wrong hands so everything gets shredded if it's even maybe questionable. So that's just a non digital tip that you can take to protect yourself. Don't go put all your old credit card statements into the recycling bin. You've just given tons of information to folks who might want to use it against you.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: You're describing me again.
Yeah, I don't want to do that. The wife, she likes the shredder. I just looked. Mark, I know this is probably not what you would use for financial records of other people, but you can get an eight sheet high security paper shredder at Amazon for 35 bucks.
So it's not going to break the bank to secure your, your financial records.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: I have the 24 sheet cross cut high security shredder.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Good for you.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: You can put a, one of those metal credit cards through this puppy and it will chop it up crazy. All right, last couple things, if something does happen. So let's say you've, you've done your best, but you were a little late and you left the door cracked and some thieving butt head got in. What do you do? Well, couple things. You can go to a website the federal government is trying.
This is a place where I think, you know, they've created some tools that aren't total, total junk. And they have a website called identitytheft.gov and it will walk you through a personalized plan. It will actually generate dispute letters for anything that isn't yours that you need to dispute. Now, if it's on your credit card, it's usually as simple as, as soon as you know something's wrong, you call your credit card company and say, that's not me. They will lock everything down quickly because it's their liability, they don't want to have to pay for it.
So.
But identity theft.gov will help you kind of do everything you need to do. If a collection agency is coming out for you, identity theft.gov will help you walk through how to deal with them. And the other thing is, if you've actually had financial loss, so you don't have to do this if you just had your credit card number stolen and they tried to buy some stuff on Amazon, but if you've actually suffered financial loss due to the incident, you should file a police report immediately because there are some of these steps in resolution that are going to say you have to have a police report for us to believe you.
And you know when you call the collections agency and say that wasn't me, they will say, show us the police report.
So file a police report if you've had material damage to yourself and, and go to identity theft.gov I think the bottom line on this stuff is that a weekend afternoon spent could get you dramatically higher long lasting protection than you will get by paying a monthly subscription fee to some service.
And you can really not. I'm sure that there's tricks to get around some of these, but you can really dramatically improve. And so few people are doing this that when the fraudsters come up against you and you've taken even a few of these steps, the likelihood is they're going to look for an easier target, not spend all their time trying to hack you or one of your children. So that's why we're encouraging you to take these steps and secure your home. Just like you wouldn't go to bed with the front door standing open. Don't your digital life and your identity out there to just be taken by anybody who'd like to use it.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: You're reminding me of our friend Lou Arnold who has the security company who just said, stephen, get the digital camera up over the front door and get us some kind of system where you could see it on your phone. You don't have to have the highest tier call the police within 10 seconds of it. If you just put it there, a thief will see that and go, not worth the chance. Moving on to the next thing.
So taking care of identity theft in the same way makes a lot of sense. Just, just put the bars up. Just, just put a barrier up. Okay, Mark, you said a lot of very practical, helpful things. I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk back through them and you check my notes. Okay?
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: You said for remediation if trouble has happened to you identitytheft.gov and file a police report.
So what we're going to ask dads to do is to do one of these things this week.
Like before the, before the weekly meeting with the wife. Do one of these things and just take a step.
But I want everybody to hear these for a reminder. I think they're great.
This isn't the order you said things in. Go to annualcreditreport.com and pull your free annual credit report. Just find out if there's been any activity. You could set up a fraud alert.
You could secure all of your accounts with notifications on your credit cards, robust passwords, two factor authentication everywhere.
You said you could do a credit freeze at all three of the credit bureaus. I think you can do that
[email protected] as well.
You said to go to IRS identity protection and get a, get an
[email protected] and get identity protection pin for your account, is that right?
[00:41:54] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Get a title alert at the county recorder for all of your properties.
And you said opt out prescreened.
Com and what does that do?
[00:42:10] Speaker B: That opts you out of those pre screened credit offers. Like you're pre approved for a new card or whatever.
[00:42:17] Speaker A: They keep them from coming into your mail. And lastly, speaking of mail, shred stuff for goodness sake. So anything else, Mark?
[00:42:26] Speaker B: No, I think you got it. I think that that really covers the vast majority of where you're going to get snagged by these, these dastardly deeds. Jello heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Okay. So you know, I find these kind of things, I don't know, kind of fun to put on the level of security. Oh, that's it. Oh, that's why I'm ahead of the game. So clever.
And I know that some people will hear this and not react this way. They'll think oh the guys are everywhere. There's every opportunity. I just want to say we're not supposed to be walking in any kind of fear. We're supposed to be walking and you're supposed to be leading dad with courage.
And the same God who told Nehemiah to fight for your family goes with you into every credit card check and password reset. So I just want to remind you that a good name is worth more than riches and you're the man positioned to guard it. If you want to join a bunch of men who are running this same route for their families, I want to invite you to come to our Abrahamic Boot Camp outside of Cincinnati 8-21-23. You can get info and sign up at abrahamswallet.com retreat.
If this topic hits home to you at all, share it with another dad and next week you're going to be back with more tools for building strong households. Until then, guard your name, love your family, trust the Lord and thanks for taking the time to join us today at Abraham's Wallet. We'll see you next week.
