Where Is My Money?

Life starts off easy. You get a job or someone gives you some money and you say to yourself, “I should put this somewhere besides my sock drawer.” So you get a checking account at your local bank branch and you set up direct deposit. Now you’re all set. Then someone says, “Hey, you should put some of that money away for a rainy day.” Well, that should probably be separated so you don’t accidentally mix up the spending portion with the portion you’re supposed to be saving…so you open a savings account at the same bank. Boom! Done! But then you start reading The Money Whys Guy and you learn about 401(k)’s, 403(b)’s, IRA’s, HSA’s, brokerage accounts, online savings accounts, business accounts, money management tools, and the list goes on. How do you manage all of this?

What you definitely should NOT do is use the same password for all of your different online accounts. This goes beyond financial accounts, but applies especially for financial accounts. If you do this and one of your accounts is hacked, then guess what, the bad guys now have access to ALL of your accounts. Once you include your email, your social media accounts, your streaming services, shopping accounts, travel accounts, and everything else you’ve had to register for, it gets overwhelming and no one other than 1988 Dustin Hoffman can remember all these logins.

I use LastPass. LastPass is a password management service that allows you to save all of your passwords in a virtual vault, using a single master password to access them all. It’s super secure and as of this writing, has over 25 million users and over 70,000 companies using it. Until I started using LastPass, I didn’t realize how many accounts I had to keep track of. At last count, I was well over 100 accounts! Security is the top priority, but next to that, it’s so easy to use, especially once you install the browser plug-in. It can auto-fill your passwords or you can choose to log in and manually copy/paste your passwords. You can set up folders, add descriptions, and even add secure notes to your logins. LastPass has become my new bookmarks bar. The basic service is free, but if you have a family or other trusted users, I would suggest a Premium or Family plan because you can easily and securely share passwords.

Questions? Concerns? Praise? Just trolling? Drop me a comment.