In Five Years

I guess this would be part one of a series of “Services I Use” posts. They won’t necessarily be posted each day, or even once a week. If I find a service that I find extremely helpful/useful, I’ll post it here. If the service has an affiliate program, I might join as an affiliate and post the link here when I write about it. However, I won’t post anything that I’m not using myself, or have at least tried to the point where I know it’s not for me, but I know how it could be useful for someone else.

So anyway, the first service is LifeLock, an Identity Theft Prevention company. For $99/year (if you use the link provided, $110/year otherwise) they take care of various services for you to help prevent identity theft. They do this five ways:

• Set Fraud Alerts on all your credit reports
• Renew the Fraud Alerts every 90 days
• Remove your name from pre-approved credit offers
• Order your yearly free credit reports
• Provide a $1,000,000 guarantee

Now if you do any research on those items, 1-4 are actually free services that you can do yourself. You just have to track down the right forms and phone numbers and remember to do it every year (or 90 days in the case of fraud alerts). Number 5 would cost you, well, it would cost you $1 million, but I think you knew that.

So why would I pay $99/year for something that’s free otherwise? Because for $8.25/month (that’s the breakdown), I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to bother resetting the fraud alert every 90 days. (Fraud alerts, by the way, mean that when you apply for credit, the company has to call to verify it’s you, so no one can get credit on your name without you knowing). I get sent a notice that the fraud alert has been set, and that’s all I need.

The other great thing that has happened over the past 5 months I’ve been signed up with them, is my junk mail has gone WAY down. I used to get at least 1, usually 2-3 pre-approved offers every day. Now, I get one every now and then from the banks I already have accounts with (Bank of America, Chase, and American Express). Even without the fraud alerts, not getting the junk mail makes it worth it (at least for me).

It was good for me to get my credit reports, as I hadn’t reviewed them in awhile. The only snag I had was I had ordered my yearly free report probably about 10 months ago, so when LifeLock tried to order it again for me, I just got a notice saying that I couldn’t get it. I sent them an email and they resolved it the next day. I got my credit report in about a week, no hassles.

So all in all I’ve been very happy with the service. It doesn’t require me to constantly monitor or log in to anything to make sure that it’s working, and it does what it says it will do. I would highly recommend this service to anyone who was looking for some way to cut down junk mail, or anyone looking for some peace of mind on the identity theft issue.

Here’s the link again, go check out the website for yourself and see what you think. LifeLock