RealEstate Investing:Invalid Password or User ID! Try Again Knucklehead.

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Error! Your password must be at least 29 characters long, include 1 upper case and 1 lower case letter, 2 symbols, 5 numbers and not have any repeating characters.  You will be asked to provide 4 unique questions and answers and you cannot make them up!  For your safety and the safety of others, this password must be changed every 3 weeks. Warning*** One more attempt at your brainless login and you will be banned from your account forever!!!  Read on for information on successful management of your logins and passwords.

I know, a little overboard but how many times do you have to request a login or password be sent to your email?  Hopefully you can remember which email you used to set up the account 3 years ago.  What happened to the 4 digit pin that was generally the last four digits of our social?  I now have user names and passwords I have no emotional connection to and I am feeling very sad about it.

I’m thankful that the banking ATM and merchant check-out process has kept my 4-digit password access available. They understand the chaos that would be created at the grocery check out if we had to request our pin numbers be sent to our email before the checker could ring us out.  I’d be back to the archaic practices of check writing or cash carrying. Please don’t do that to me!!

We are reminded again and again about identity theft. As technology advances, it’s not “if it will happen to you,” it’s “how many times it will happen to you?” It is very important that you don’t use the same user name and password for every account you have online.

How do you manage all these logins and passwords? Some people actually have them on sticky notes hanging all over the perimeter of their screens, some have them in Outlook, Word, Notepad, or excel document easily accessible by anyone who is able to open the file.  Some people, like me, try to keep them in their head until it is ready to explode.  I have always had a good memory for numbers and codes. I used to pride myself on remembering every phone number I have ever had since I was old enough to dial the phone.  Now…I have pushed all that beautiful nostalgia out of my little brain by overwhelming it with useless data.  Well, could be just getting older… but I refuse to go there.

To the rescue!!!  My friend Michael Russer sent out an email that changed my password and login nightmare. He told me about a free password vault program called Password Agent. You can download it to your computer, add folders and files for all your passwords and lock it down with one…just one…password entry login.   I also have the file stored on an external drive that I travel with just in case I don’t have my personal laptop or access to my home server.

Can you imagine if we all did this and didn’t have to call into customer support to get our login and passwords? Think about how much time you would save and how much more effective the use of technology customer support centers could be? We may even be able to help our tech providers save money and create better rates for us?  Every call to customer support for a login and/or password issue costs money. I would much rather they spend money on perfecting the solution than helping me remember my password. Think about it.

I was holding out for finger print recognition to be the norm but then had a second thought…have someone cut off my thumb or spew a code? …I’ll spew.