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MoneyTips Tax filing season is upon us. Soon you will be filing your paperwork and perhaps receiving a nice check — unless thieves file a return in your name first and falsely claim your refund. Unfortunately, if a thief has your Social Security number and other relevant information, tax identity theft is very hard to prevent. Greg McBride, Chief Financial Analyst for Bankrate.com, notes that "somebody could have your Social Security number and they could have been sitting on it for a while... you would have no idea until they go and file a bogus tax return under your Social Security number. You only find out at the point where your legitimate return gets rejected." While recent IRS efforts prevented $2.7 billion fraudulent refunds from being issued from January to September 2019,

MoneyTips Thanks to large-scale hacks such as the Equifax and Yahoo breaches, identity thieves have no shortage of information to use in their criminal pursuits. Is your information among them? "Identity theft can trash your credit score because there's the risk that somebody takes your name, your Social Security number, and your solid credit rating, goes out, applies for a bunch of credit, and then doesn't repay any of it," cautions Bankrate.com Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Analyst Greg McBride. "That can really just destroy what otherwise had been years of hard work on your part to build a solid credit rating." You may not be able to stop all identity theft methods, but you can take common-sense steps to protect your information and limit the likelihood of damage. In honor of Data Privacy Day (January 28), we present 15 preventative actions that you should take. 1. Check Your Accounts Regularly – Frequently review all credit and de...

MoneyTips Holiday Debt On the Increase Are your credit cards still smoking from holiday overuse? Based on a recent MagnifyMoney survey , it wouldn't be surprising. Consumers who financed their holiday spending averaged $1,325 in holiday spending debt – a sharp increase from 2018's $1,230, 2017's $1,054 average and 2016's $1,003 average. Increases in wages and consumer confidence are at least partly to blame. Did a personal increase in wages and confidence lead you into a mountain of holiday debt? We've given previous tips on dealing with excessive holiday debt . You've got more debt – so we've got five more tips, for a total of 10. 6. Slice Your Budget Further To pay off holiday debt, you can't sett... from MoneyTips https://ift.tt/38a6nZf

MoneyTips Holiday Debt On the Increase Are your credit cards still smoking from holiday overuse? Based on a recent MagnifyMoney survey , it wouldn't be surprising. Consumers who financed their holiday spending averaged $1,325 in holiday spending debt – a sharp increase from 2018's $1,230, 2017's $1,054 average and 2016's $1,003 average. Increases in wages and consumer confidence are at least partly to blame. Did a personal increase in wages and confidence lead you into a mountain of holiday debt? We've given previous tips on dealing with excessive holiday debt . You've got more debt – so we've got five more tips, for a total of 10. 6. Slice Your Budget Further To pay off holiday debt, you can't sett... from MoneyTips https://ift.tt/38a6nZf

MoneyTips Santa was not so kind to your friends and relatives this year, so you felt the need to fill the gap. You overspent on holiday gifts, and now you are stuck with a significant amount of holiday debt. Gratitude from gift recipients is a great feeling, but gratitude is not going to pay off your MasterCard bill. If it's any comfort, you're not alone; according to one report, Americans racked up an average of $1,325 in debt last holiday season. What do you do? Start with the classic bit of advice – "if you are in a hole, stop digging." Recognize that you overspent, and freeze your spending until you can take the following steps. How to Reduce Holiday Debt Assess the Situation and Rebalance the Budget – Face up to your debt and total up the damage. Rebalance your budget to account for this new debt, and look for any budgeted spending that you can temporarily drop. You will need to eat out less often and delay other discretionary spendi... from MoneyTip

MoneyTips If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, imitation of your credit cards must be the sincerest form of identity theft. For years, identity thieves have produced copies of credit cards (otherwise called card cloning) by stealing the information stored on a card's magnetic stripe and transferring it onto fake cards for their own use. Magnetic stripe cards carry and transmit the same card information with each purchase. Thieves often gather this information by installing skimmers or shimmers on card readers. Generally speaking, skimmers are overlays that fit on top of card reader slots to gather magnetic stripe information, while shimmers are installed inside reader slots and are designed to record information from EMV cards (commonly called chip cards). You probably already have an EMV card. Most card issuers switched to

MoneyTips The convenience of modern digital commerce comes with an unfortunate side effect: it makes identity theft more convenient as well. The 2019 Identity Fraud study from Javelin Strategy and Research found that 14.4 million consumers in the U.S. were victims of identity theft during 2018, to the tune of $14.7 billion. "It may seem time-consuming to research and adopt best practices to prevent identity theft. However, identity theft prevention will ultimately save time in the long run," says Amy Thomann of TransUnion's consumer communications. In the end, the fraud affects you and your creditors and card issuers directly, but your stolen card information can generate multiple transactions before you even see a dime of losses. Identity thieves can choose to sell your credit card information to others instead of using it for their own purposes. If your credit card information is stolen a... from MoneyTips https://ift.tt/36rkgS4

MoneyTips The convenience of modern digital commerce comes with an unfortunate side effect: it makes identity theft more convenient as well. The 2019 Identity Fraud study from Javelin Strategy and Research found that 14.4 million consumers in the U.S. were victims of identity theft during 2018, to the tune of $14.7 billion. "It may seem time-consuming to research and adopt best practices to prevent identity theft. However, identity theft prevention will ultimately save time in the long run," says Amy Thomann of TransUnion's consumer communications. In the end, the fraud affects you and your creditors and card issuers directly, but your stolen card information can generate multiple transactions before you even see a dime of losses. Identity thieves can choose to sell your credit card information to others instead of using it for their own purposes. If your credit card information is stolen a... from MoneyTips https://ift.tt/36rkgS4