Posted On: September 15, 2017  |    Posted by: Broke Millennial®

The Equifax data breach is the first time I’ve felt a sense of dread over hackers stealing personal information from a company. This isn’t just about  credit card numbers, names, and maybe addresses being sold on the dark web. I’ve had my credit card (and even debit card) compromised before and it’s not a huge headache to handle. This Equifax breach though, that’s all the important personal information down to Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and possibly driver’s license numbers. It’s wrapping up everything an identity thief to make your life miserable.

Like 143 million other Americans, I had the pleasure of receiving this delightful message from Equifax:

You can check for yourself if you’ve been impacted by going here.

TrustedID Premier is Equifax’s credit monitoring and identity theft protection service. I’ll be honest, I’m not terribly inclined to put my faith in the company that compromised my information to protect said private information moving forward.

Instead of immediately enrolling in TrustedID Premier, I decided to get a little more hands on and put a credit freeze on my credit reports across all three bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). When I first published this post around 4 pm on September 15, 2017 – I had been unable to get through to put the credit freeze on my Equifax report. The credit bureau claimed it’s due to the high demand which is creating technical issues. I have been able to put freezes on Experian and TransUnion. Later that night around 11:40 pm, I was able to get through and freeze Equifax as well.

At this point, you’ve probably read the advice to put a credit freeze on your reports elsewhere in the news – so I’ve had a lot of questions from readers, friends, and family about what exactly that means and what a credit freeze does. So let’s dive into everything credit freeze!

WHAT IS A CREDIT FREEZE?

When you apply for credit – whether that’s a credit card, auto loan, mortgage, or any other kind – the lender pulls your credit report in the process to determine if you are a reliable borrower. Think of a credit freeze as the ultimate way to shut down a lender being able to pull your credit report. When a lender tries to pull a frozen credit report, the lender receives a message indicating the report is frozen. You as the rightful owner of said credit report will have a pin number that will give you the ability to temporarily thaw or permanently unfreeze your report in order to give a lender access.

If the person requesting the loan or line of credit is unable to thaw the report, then the lender will also know it’s likely a fraudster.

WHY YOU’D WANT TO USE A CREDIT FREEZE

A credit freeze is one of the most proactive measures you can put in place to deal with the threat of identity theft. All the necessary information for an identity takeover could be floating around or already sold right now due to the data breach. That means people could be applying for mortgages, buying cars, getting cell phone plans, and opening credit cards in your name. When that debt goes to collections – the debtors are coming a knocking on your door.

Freezing your credit report with all three credit bureaus now is going to make it much harder for thieves to use your information in nefarious ways.

JUST EQUIFAX WAS COMPROMISED, WHY PUT A FREEZE ON ALL 3 CREDIT REPORTS?

Yes, just Equifax experienced the data breach – but the compromised information is all a thief needs to start assuming your identity. Let’s say a scammer named Sammi has my data. Sammi can head over to Chase and get a personal loan as Erin Lowry. Now it’s important to know that lenders are not always pulling all three credit reports. Instead, maybe Chase only uses TransUnion reports. If I only freeze the Equifax report, but it’s not the one the lender pulls, then Sammi has no problem getting a loan as Erin.

YOUR EXISTING LINES OF CREDIT STILL FUNCTION 

For the most part, your existing lines of credit will remain largely unaffected by your decision to freeze your credit reports. You can still use your credit cards, your mortgage will be fine, student loan debts are still a burden, and your auto loan will be intact. However, if you want to change any current lines of credit, such as refinancing student loan debt or asking for a credit limit increase, then you may need to thaw your reports to grant access to your lenders.

YOU CAN STILL PULL YOUR CREDIT REPORTS

You’ll also be able to still access your own credit reports after issuing a freeze. By federal law, you are entitled to one free copy of your credit report from each of the three bureaus per year. Go to annualcreditreport.com to pull your reports. It’s also a great idea to do this soon to check for any irregularities and, assuming it’s all correct, get a sense of what your report should look like.

IT DOES NOT NEGATIVELY IMPACT YOUR CREDIT SCORE

One of the biggest questions I keep receiving is some iteration of “I’m trying to improve my credit. How will freezing my report impact my credit score?”

The freeze itself will not negatively impact your score because your current lines of credit will just keep reporting per usual.

YOU CAN STILL BE IMPROVING/MAINTAINING YOUR CREDIT SCORE

The first step to continuing to improve your credit score is to keep making on time payments every month. The second is to keep the utilization rates (amount of available credit you’re using) on your credit cards nice and low. The ideal is less than 30% per month.

As long as you keep making those moves (or paying down credit card debt to get towards the ideal utilization), then you’ll keep seeing improvements in your score.

For those with healthy scores already, just keep maintaining those good behaviors after the freeze and all will be well – assuming there isn’t ID Theft that sends debt to collections.

HOW YOU SET UP A CREDIT FREEZE

The process is quite painless. You’ll be asked basic information including full name, Social Security number, birth date, current address, and last address if you’ve moved in the last two years. Then you’ll be taken through a series of questions to confirm your identity, which usually revolve around where you’ve lived and your previous or current lines of credit. Don’t be too freaked if there is one or two to which you answer “none of the above” or “does not apply”.  You’ll receive confirmation of the freeze along with a pin number. Protect the pin number!

You can initiate the process with each credit bureau online by using the links below:

• Equifax
• TransUnion
• Experian

DON’T LOSE YOUR PIN

You’ll either be assigned or asked to create a pin number when you set up your credit freeze. It will be a unique pin with each credit bureau. Do not lose this pin! It’s what you will need to unfreeze or thaw your credit report. It will become incredibly difficult to unfreeze if you lose your pin number. Also, don’t store your pin in your email.

DOESN’T A CREDIT FREEZE COST MONEY?

Yes, a credit freeze can cost money depending on your state. It’s generally free if you’ve been the victim of identity theft, but in some cases you do need to file a police report to formerly claim you’ve been a victim. The cost is generally no more than $15 per credit bureau if you don’t file as a victim of identity theft and often times states allow you to freeze for free the first time.

You can learn more about the fees in your state by clicking here. 

I’M IN THE MIDDLE OF APPLYING FOR CREDIT, WHAT DO I DO?

You might be in the middle of applying for credit or about to shop around for a mortgage, auto loan or student loan refinancing. If any of those things are happening in the next month, then it’s best to just keep an eye out for unusual activity but hold off on freezing until after you secure your loan. But if it’s more like three to six months away, then it may be in your best interest to freeze now and do a temporary thaw later when you’re ready to shop around.

FRAUD ALERTS INSTEAD OF A FREEZE

Not convinced that a credit freeze is the way to go? Then you could place fraud alerts on your credit reports. It won’t freeze your reports, but alerts potential lenders that you may have been the victim of fraud and that the lender should take extra precautions before granting a line of credit. Generally, a fraud alert will last 90 days, but you can ask to extend for up to seven years. You will need an identity theft report in order to place an extended alert on your reports.

It’s not a bad option, but doesn’t give quite as much protection as the freeze because a fraudster may have the necessary information needed to answer the questions a lender could ask to verify your identity.

WHEN A CREDIT FREEZE WON’T BE TERRIBLY HELPFUL

Unfortunately, a credit freeze isn’t a cure-all for the Equifax data breach or any identity theft. It certainly helps mitigate some of your risk, but you still need to be vigilant for issues like medical identity theft as well as tax fraud. With your name, address, birth date, and Social Security number – fraudsters could claim to be you in order to receive medical care and that bill is either coming to you or going to collections and landing on your report. You may also have an issue with someone filing as you for a fake tax return. You’d find out about that when you file your own annual return and it reports that you’ve already filed. Neither of these require credit reports to be pulled, so a credit freeze isn’t much help.

You can try to beat any fraudster to the tax return issue by filing early instead of waiting until the April 15^th deadline. Medical debt is a bit harder to defend against other than monitoring your credit report and flagging misinformation. Unfortunately, it will still be quite a headache for you if a medical debt goes to collections as it will tank your credit score while you fight to prove it’s not your debt.

IDENTITY THIEVES RUN A LONG CON…

You have to keep your guard up for a long time now. Identity theft isn’t just a short-term problem. That information isn’t going to be changing, so it could be months or years before you may have your identity compromised.

Be vigilant for phishing scams via email, snail mail, or the phone. Don’t give anyone information about your insurance plans, more identifying information, or bank details. Keep an eye on all your existing accounts as well. Set up any alerts available to you for bank accounts and credit cards so you can be notified of a scam charge or transfer immediately. This hack could mean they’re coming for your existing accounts, not just making new ones in your name.

You can also start to brush up on how to handle identity theft by reading the Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft action plan.

Reference: https://brokemillennial.com/

October 2nd, 2017

A Social Experiment

If you, like many people, use social media and generally agree that it’s an important technology, try the following experiment.

Take out a piece of paper and list your most important uses for these services — the activities that social media is well-suited to provide and that unambiguously enrich your life. This list, for example, might include items like:

• The ability to see new photos of your nephews, nieces, or grandchildren.
• The Facebook Group used to run a local organization you belong to.
• The  hashtag that keeps you up to date with the latest news from an activist movement that you support.

The social media industrial complex* likes to point to lists like these to justify its importance. “It would be crazy to dismiss our technology,” they cry, “look at all these useful things people do with it!”

But here’s the second part of the experiment: estimate honestly how much time it would take per week to satisfy these important uses. In my experience, for most people, the answer is around 15 – 30 minutes.

And yet, the average American adult social media user spends two hours per day on these services, with almost half this time dedicated to Facebook products alone.

This is the disconnect that the social media industrial complex doesn’t want you to notice. They want the conversation to stop at the assertion that social media isn’t useless, and then hope people move on without questioning the specific role these services have claimed on their limited and valuable time and attention.

The social media business model depends on this oversight.

To be more concrete, I claim that most users could probably reap 95% of the value they get out of social media by signing in twice a week, on a desktop or laptop, to catch up on the latest photos, or check their organization’s group, or to browse the most recent chatter relevant to a movement they care about. Let’s called this controlled use of these services.

Social media companies cannot reach multi-billion dollar valuations, or return consistent stock growth to their investors, based on controlled use. What they need is compulsive use, which is what happens when you launch the app on your phone with some important goal in mind, and then thirty minutes later look up and realize you’ve been snagged into an addictive streak of low-value tapping, liking, and swiping.

As former Google employee and whistleblower Tristan Harris explains, these companies carefully engineer their products — especially the versions readily available through apps on your phone — to exploit psychological weak spots to trap you into compulsive use. For example:

• The “like” button? This was added to inject more intermittent reinforcement into the social media browsing experience — significantly increasing the amount of times people check their accounts.
• The ability to “tag” people in your posted photos? The primary purpose of this feature (which, when considered objectively, is really pretty arbitrary) is to create a new stream of social approval indicators — something our tribal brains are evolved to take deadly seriously, and therefore induces people — surprise, surprise — to significantly increase the amount of times they check their accounts.

With this in mind, I’m going to stop short of asking you (yet again — I was chagrined to recently learn that I’m the top two results when you google “Quit Social Media”) to consider leaving these services altogether. Instead, let me make a suggestion that the social media industrial complex fears far more: change your relationship with these services to shift from compulsive to controlled use.

Still use social media, if you must: but on a schedule; just a handful of times a week; preferably on a desktop to laptop, which tames the most devastatingly effective psychological exploitations baked into the phone apps.

You have very little to lose, as controlled use preserves all of the things you seriously value from these services, but have so much to gain when you decide there’s a better use for that extra 13.5 hours a week than helping prop up real estate prices in Northern California.

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* This is my somewhat facetious term for the powerful combination of the massive social media platform monopolies, and the growing sector of the knowledge tech economy — gurus, consultants, online brand managers, etc. — that depends on the belief that social media is fundamental to modern commerce and life.

Reference: http://calnewport.com/blog/

September 18th, 2017

Kevin Kelly and the Amish

Eight years after dropping out of college to wander Asia, Kevin Kelly returned home to America, bought an inexpensive bike, and made a meandering 5,000 mile journey across the country. As he recalls in his original and insightful 2010 book, What Technology Wants, the “highlight” of the bike tour was “gliding through the tidy farmland of the Amish in eastern Pennsylvania.”

Kelly ended up returning to the Amish on multiple occasions during the years that followed his first encounter, allowing him to develop a nuanced understanding of how these communities approach technology. As he reveals in Chapter 11 of his book, the common idea that the Amish reject all modern technology is a myth. The reality is not only more interesting, but it also has important implications for our current culture.

As Kelly puts it: “In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grasp of technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative.”

Given such a strong endorsement, it seems worthwhile to briefly summarize what Kelly uncovered during these visits to rural Pennsylvania…

The Amish and Technology

“Amish lives are anything but anti-technological,” Kelly writes. “I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselvers. They are often, surprisingly, pro-technology.”

He explains that the simple notion of the Amish as Luddites vanishes as soon as you approach a standard Amish farm. “Cruising down the road you may see an Amish kid in a straw hat and suspenders zipping by on Rollerblades.”

Some Amish communities use tractors, but only with metal wheels so they cannot drive on roads like cars. Some allow a gas-powered wheat thresher but require horses to pull the “smoking contraption.” Personal phones (cellular or household) are almost always prohibited, but many communities maintain a community phone booth.

Almost no Amish communities allow automobile ownership, but it’s common for Amish to travel in cars driven by others.

Kelly reports that both solar panels and diesel electric generators are common, but it’s usually forbidden to connect to the larger municipal power grid.

Disposable diapers are popular as are chemical fertilizers.

In one memorable passage, Kelly talks about visiting a family that uses a $400,000 computer-controlled precision milling machine to produce pneumatic parts needed by the community. The machine is run by the family’s bonnet-wearing, 10-year old daughter. It’s housed behind their horse stable.

These observations dismiss the common belief that the Amish reject any technology invented after the 19th century. So what’s really going on here?

The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backwards to ask whether a given technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

As Kelly explains, when a new technology rolls around, there’s typically an “alpha geek” in any given Amish community that will ask the parish bishops permission to try it out. Usually the bishops will agree. The whole community will then observe this first adopter “intently,” trying to discern the ultimate impact of the technology on the things the community values most.

If this impact is deemed more negative than helpful the technology is prohibited. Otherwise it’s allowed, but usually with caveats on its use that optimize its positives and minimize its negatives.

The reason most Amish are prohibited to own cars, for example, has to do with their impact on the social fabric of the community. As Kelly explains:

“When cars first appeared at the turn of the last century, the Amish noticed that drivers would leave the community to go picnicking or sightseeing in other towns, instead of visiting family or the sick on Sundays, or patronizing local shops on Saturday. Therefore the ban on unbridled mobility was intended to make it hard to travel far and to keep energy focused in the local community. Some parishes did this with more strictness than others.”

This also explains why an Amish farmer can own a solar panel but not connect to the power grid. The problem is not electricity, it’s the fact that the grid connects them toostrongly to the world outside of their local community, violating the Amish commandment to “be in the world, but not of it.”

The Original Digital Minimalists

I titled this post: Approach Technology Like the Amish. To be clear, I don’t mean that you should adopt the specific values of Amish life, as these are based primarily on their often illiberal and admittedly esoteric religious beliefs.

What I do mean, however, is that you should consider adopting their same thoughtfulness in approaching technology. The Amish are clear about what they value, and new technologies are evaluated by their impact on these values. The key is building a good life — not fretting about missing out on some minor short term pleasure or interesting diversion.

(If we held ourselves to this same standard, I suspect, many fewer people would own Apple watches.)

Later in this chapter, Kelly asks the key question: “This method works for the Amish, but can it work for the rest of us?”

He then answers: “I don’t know.”

I’m more confident than Kelly. I think something like this method can work for the rest of us, especially once you replace Amish values with your personal values, and the decree of your parish bishops with your own honest self-assessment.

In fact, I even have a name for such a philosophy: digital minimalism.

(Photo by frankieleon)

Reference: http://calnewport.com/blog/

August 20th, 2017

The iGen Problem

Many people recently sent me the same article from the current issue of The Atlantic. It’s titled, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”, and it’s written by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

The article describes Twenge’s research on iGen, her name for kids born between 1995 and 2012 — the first generation to grow up with smartphones. Here’s a short summary of her alarming conclusions:

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

I won’t bother describing all of Twenge’s findings here. If you’re interested, read the original article, or her new book on the topic, which comes out this week.

The point I want to make instead is that in my position as someone who researches and writes on related topics,  I’ve started to hear this same note of serious alarm from multiple different reputable sources — including the head of a well-known university’s mental health program, and a reporter currently bird-dogging the topic for a major national publication.

In other words, I don’t think this growing concern about the mental health impact of smartphones on young people is simply nostalgia-tinged, inter-generational ribbing.

Something really scary is probably going on.

My prediction is that we’re going to see a change in the next 2 – 5 years surrounding how parents think about the role of smartphones in their kids’ lives. There will be a shift from shrugging our shoulders and saying “what can we do?”, to squaring our shoulders and asking with more authority, “what are we going to do?”

(Photo by Pabak Sarkar)

Reference: http://calnewport.com/blog/

June 7th, 2017 · 30 comments

Insights from Dirty Jobs

Earlier this week, I listened to Brett McKay’s interview with Mike Rowe. As you’ll learn if you listen to the conversation, following his stint as the host of Dirty Jobs, Rowe has become an advocate for the trades.

In this interview, as in many others, Rowe argues that skilled labor (think: plumbing, welding) can be both satisfying and lucrative, and yet there are still somewhere around three million such jobs left unfilled in this country. He credits this gap largely to a contemporary culture that demonizes blue collar work and preaches the best path is always a college degree, followed, God willing, by a pair of Warby Parker glasses and a job as a social media brand manager.

(I might have added that last part.)

I always find Rowe’s thoughts on shifting American work cultures interesting, but there’s a phrase he often uses in these discussions that has recently begun to draw my attention: efficiency versus effectiveness.

Rowe notes that knowledge work seems obsessed with efficiency, while the skilled trades seem more concerned with effectively solving problems (c.f., his infamous TED talk on sheep castration).

The former can be dehumanizing, while the latter tends to be satisfying.

Stepping away from the immediate context of Rowe’s advocacy, I think he has touched on an important point here that highlights a little-discussed problem rotting the core of the knowledge economy…

The Failure of Techno-Productivism

Those who work with information have become obsessed with what I sometimes call techno-productivism: the idea that introducing technologies that simplify or speed up certain work tasks will necessarily make you or your organization increasingly more productive.

(Note, I use “productive” here in the true economic sense of producing more value per labor hour invested.)

Techno-productivism is intuitive. But it has also been, in my opinion, a failed ideology.

By focusing relentlessly on making specific tasks or operations easier and faster, instead of stepping back and trying to understand how to make an organization as a whole maximally effective, we’ve ended with a knowledge work culture in which people spend the vast majority of their time trying to keep up with the very inboxes, devices and channels that were conceived for the exact opposite purpose — to liberate more time for more valuable efforts.

Instead of striving for the embodied effectiveness of the skilled craftsman, in other words, we’ve ended up a twitching hyperactive mess of unstructured communication.

Rowe hints at an interesting path out of this swamp: stop lionizing efficiency, and start asking the question that has guided craftsmen for millennia: what’s the most effectiveway for me to accomplish the things that are most important?

(Photo by gato-gato-gato)

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Speaking of effectiveness, I want to pitch a kickstarter, initiated by a friend of mine, that just launched this week: Mouse Books. The concept is elegant: important and compelling works of literature delivered in a pocket size printing, roughly the size of an smartphone. When you feel the urge for distraction, instead of pulling out your phone, you can pull out a Mouse book and read something meaningful. This is cat nip for Study Hacks fans. Check it out…