What is a Good Password?

A good password is one that you can remember but is hard to guess. It should be longer than 10 characters (letters, or numbers) and it should be different to all your other passwords. (Please don’t use the same password for your email and Facebook accounts!) It should have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers and (if allowed) contain a special character. It should not be your car registration number, your date of birth, your child’s name or anything that can be read by someone publically on your Facebook wall or profile.
Deliberately misspell words and use numbers in place of vowels. You can use 4 instead of A, 3 for E, 1 for I, 0 (zero) for O or make up your own code.

Here is an example password: d#rAin1nSpa1n

(Whatever you do, don’t copy that password because it is on a public website and could easily be added to the list of passwords that hackers use, so make up your own short phrase).
For this example I have taken a short phrase, ”The rain in Spain” and misspelled it by removing the spaces, replacing the letter ‘i’ with the number ‘1’ in two places and replaced the word ‘the’ with the letter ‘d’. Note that instead of using and uppercase ‘R’ in rain, I made the ‘A’ uppercase just to mix things up a little and make it a little harder to guess and then I used a ‘#’ symbol just to make the password a little more complicated. Longer passwords that use misspelled phrases are much harder to guess.

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Good Practice

Change your passwords regularly, at least every few months. If you can’t remember different passwords then try to add codes to the password like FBd#rAin1nSpa1n for Facebook and GMd#rAin1nSpa1n (except don’t use FB because that is too obvious, make up a code that is unique for you and easy for you to remember).
When you change your password, if you really must use similar passwords then you could try adding extra numbers or characters to the end of it

d#rAin1nSpa1n0!, d#rAin1nSpa1n0@, d#rAin1nSpa1n0# …

Don’t store all your passwords where they can easily be found, like in a notepad next to your computer or on your cell phone or in a plain text document on your computer.
I know that all sounds like a lot of effort but cybercrime is not going away anytime soon and you need to be on your guard or someone will gladly take advantage of you. The more of these rules you follow the less likely you will find your accounts have been hacked.

Next time I will show you how to check that your Facebook account is secure and tell you what information you should hide in your profile.

Do you have any password tips? Please leave a comment if you do.

You might have Facebook friends that are unaware of the scams going around so please share this link.

Now I am fortunate in that I work in IT and have seen scams like that before (though none coming from a friend), I also happened to know that my friend was not on a vacation, so I knew instantly that his email account had been hacked. Unfortunately my friend used the same email account and password for his Facebook account, so his Facebook account had been hacked as well. The hacker (or hackers) were logging onto his Facebook account and trying to chat with any of his friends that were online and were telling much the same story as the one they were passing around via his email. One of his other friends was nearly going to send the money.

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Lesson 1: Learn to check up on things

If you are new to the Internet you might feel a little overwhelmed at the prospect of avoiding Internet scams but by setting your computer up correctly, automatically updating your computer and following a few tips you can have a reasonably safe Internet experience. This article’s tip is simply learning to be wary and check up on things.

Scammers are getting more and more sophisticated in the way they are trying to scam people. So regardless of whether you get a strange phone call from someone claiming to be from your bank or an email from the government or the lawyer of a long lost relative in Nigeria who wants to pass on a massive fortune to you or an email from even your closest friend; if they are asking for sensitive information (like anything to do with your credit card or bank account or anything that can help identify you) or if they ask for a ‘small’ fee to clear funds or help them get out of trouble, don’t take it at face value. If it’s too good to be true it most probably is. If you think it is a scam then hang up the phone or don’t reply. Never open suspicious emails or email attachments or reply to suspicious emails. Don’t click on strange looking links in an email; when you do think that the link is legitimate then always check that the link is going to a website that is spelt correctly. To check the link just hover your mouse over the link and look at the bottom of the web browser to check the spelling.

In Internet Explorer 9, links show up in a little window in the bottom left hand corner.

A good link will look something like https://mybank.com; watch out for misspellings like mibank.com, mybank.comm.org, my-bank.com, mybank.com.ru, irs.govv.net.

Basically if you are not sure what the link is then don’t click on it. Phone back using a listed number listed from the phone book not one that you see in an email.

Ok that’s tip number 1; in the next article I will look at how to avoid being hacked.

What are your experiences with hackers or scammers? Please share them in the comments. Do you have or know of a good website on scams that is easy to understand? Please share the link in the comments.

This article is an overview of how to manage you finance. I will also provide links to other articles that in my opinion are of high quality. My aim is to save you time researching this topic yourself by linking you to good content. So if you think that the links that I provide will be of interest to you then please bookmark this page and use it as a reference tool. (You can always delete the bookmark later). Feedback and questions are welcome (my email address is on my contact page). I hope you find this resource useful and please share it on Facebook if you do.

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Budget planning

Many of us get ourselves into tight financial situations simply because we don’t carefully plan for our expenses and our spending. We don’t plan for a rainy day and when it comes we find ourselves taking out high interest loans and maxing out our credit cards and deep in debt. Debt is a major cause of friction in relationships; it also is a cause of anxiety and stress. The secret to financial security is to have money working for you so that you are the one getting paid the interest instead of being the one paying high (compound) interest to a bank.
One way to do that is to have a budget plan. When you do up a budget plan, you simply make a list of all your expenses, spending and income and plan ahead so that you are spending less that you are earning. The Australian government put together this webpage on budgeting which gives advice on budgeting and a link to a free online budget planner and a free excel spreadsheet. (See the links in the next section for reviews and links to more free budgeting software).
How Stuff Works has 10 tips for staying on budget.

Free Budget Software

Budget software is computer software that allows you to type in all your expenses, spending and income. It then calculates whether or not your income is sufficient for your current level of spending. If not, then you need to look at your spending and work out what items you can wait longer for or make do with less of. Unfortunately it all requires discipline, you need to download the software, make time to enter it and more importantly know just how much spare funds you have when you are out shopping or browsing for something to buy online. My point is that to get the best out of this software will take effort but the effort is very well worth it. Here is a list of articles that review budget planning software.

About.com has the following two lists of mobile apps. (Great way to keep track of your budget during those shopping trips).
10 Android Personal Finance Apps
18 iPhone Personal Finance Apps

Microsoft has a free Family monthly budget planner that you can use with Excel (2003 or better).

Well that’s it for now, next week I’ll look at online scams and how to avoid them.

Do you have a favorite free or low cost budget application that you like to use? What experiences have you had with budgeting? Do you have any tips or useful links? Please send me a comment and let me know.

All the best with your budgeting.