2008 February | Wheatworks Blog: Financial Matters

Buying a Home in “The Jungle”

2/23/2008, 10:36 am

Buying a house has always been stressful. Few who buy houses are expert enough in all the different aspects of buying a house that it can be done with complete comfort. If you find home buying stressful, you’ll want to read one of my favorite tales of home buying in American literature.

Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, “The Jungle”, is about the corruption of business in the early 20th century. The novel centers around the struggling Rudkus family who arrive in Chicago from Lithuania. (The University of Virginia’s web site offers the electronic text of “The Jungle” and other great American hypertexts.)

Chapter 4 of the Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle”, describes the Rudkus family’s purchase of a home. Sinclair skillfully describes the stress and even terror that can be associated with buying a house. It’s a great read and it may help you feel better knowing that home buying was as stressful 100 years ago as it is today.

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Refinancing … is this a good time?

2/19/2008, 8:22 pm

“How to tell if now is the time to refinance” is Jane Hodges’ article on MSNBC.com today. It’s a well-written summary of how one can determine whether refinancing is a good option. She looks at both sides of the coin and offer suggestion about situations that make it wise to consider refinancing as well as some reasons it may be unwise or difficult to refinance. It’s a nice summary.

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Tags: personal finance, refinance
Category: Information | Comment

Encrypt Your Financial Information

2/18/2008, 8:03 am

I wrote yesterday about Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe. I use it and I recommend it. It makes password security easy.

Today, think about the financial information you have stored on your computer. Is it in a spreadsheet in your “My Documents” folder? Do you have brokerage or retirement account reports saved as PDF files on your desktop? Is your tax return stored for any good hacker to see in your tax software’s data directory?

TrueCrypt, http://www.truecrypt.org/, is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is the best tool I’ve found to protect my financial information. I’ve used it for years and do not fear the loss of my financial data … or any other data, files, photos, etc. that I have encrypted. All my USB memory keys are encrypted with TrueCrypt and now (after the release of version 5 last week) my hard drives are too.

In fact, the BEST feature of TrueCrypt 5.0 is drive encryption. You can use TrueCrypt to encrypt your entire hard drive so that, without the correct password, no one can access your computer.

Caution: Even if you protect your computer with TrueCrypt, a weak password is a no-no. I use passwords of 20 random characters containing upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Brute force efforts might crack them give enough time, but I have nothing that warrants the time a brute force effort would entail.

Here’s an example of a strong password:

K8dn20f^j3#(IaQL1@gM

With a strong password, TrueCrypt and Password Safe, you have a lot of what you need to protect your financial data. All three are free!

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Tags: encryption, financial data security, financial information, Identity Theft, password safe, strong password, truecrypt
Category: Financial Tips, Identity Theft | Comment

Protect Your Financial Passwords

2/17/2008, 11:04 am

Protecting yourself online takes work. One cannot go willy-nilly where one wishes on the Internet … there are bad neighborhoods on the ‘net. Nor can one leave one’s own doors unlocked. Computer security requires constant effort.

Most know to use locked down firewalls and to use encrypted drives with long, random string passwords which are not written on sticky notes and stuck to monitors. The careful computer users make at least two back ups on encrypted devices which are stored off site in vaults.

Now, while paranoia about losing data or losing it to the wrong person may help you be safer than most computer users, you do have to realize that being paranoid (and consequently, safer) doesn’t mean someone’s not out there trying to get you data. There are people who would love to have access to your financial accounts.

You must protect your financial passwords!

One of the best tools for keeping financial passwords safe is Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe.

Learn more about Bruce and information security at http://www.schneier.com. (You’ll be glad you did.) And if you want to secure your financial passwords, try Password Safe. “Password Safe is completely free: no license requirements, shareware fees, or other strings attached.”