Rotarian Alan Kirth shared his insights on how to protect your personal financial data with Millbrae Rotarians. Kirth is Sales Manager and Sr. Commercial & Residential Loan Advisor at Guarantee Mortgage, as well as the Immediate Past President of the California Association of Mortgage Professionals (SF/Peninsula Chapter). Some key takeaways:
- you can obtain a free credit report annually from annualcreditreport.com (Be very careful to use this site, rather than some others that try to make it sound like they are legitimate.)
- consider putting a lock on your credit with the three credit rating agencies
- don't divulge personal information when using public wifi because it may be vulnerable to access by hackers (it's probably OK to do some internet surfing on public wifi, but if you're accessing sites where you need to enter a password, you should be very careful about the types of information that might be visible to another party)