We have been advising our clients and community to take this time to declutter, simplify, and focus on what matters most.

Where should you start? Check out this post!

It’s a new year and resolutions are in place, but investors in the financial markets may be struggling to find their optimism. The past several weeks have been very difficult, as the stock market sell-off resulted in the worst December performance since 1931. It’s understandable how such a dramatic decline can deliver a blow to investor confidence and lead to reactions driven by fear and an instinct to protect ourselves from further losses.

Last year the data breach at Equifax compromised the records of over 140 million people. In the wake of the breach, Equifax offered consumers a year of free credit monitoring. This offer, which has also been made by other breached companies, helps people whose data may have been stolen take action against identity thieves who try to open fraudulent credit accounts. But what should you do once the free year of monitoring has passed? If your data was exposed in the Equifax hack or any other data breach, it’s still vulnerable and could be used to steal your identity at any time.

Three steps you could potentially take to protect yourself are credit freezes, credit locks, and credit alerts. Each has its pros and cons.

A credit freeze is a valuable tool for protecting your credit in case of a data breach. If you put a freeze on your credit report, a credit agency is prohibited from disclosing the report to anyone. Without the ability to check a credit report, lenders won’t extend credit to anyone attempting to open an account in your name.

It seems like hardly a month goes by without news of a major company suffering a data breach. Many smaller incidents fly under our radar because we weren’t affected. But given that billions of records have already been stolen this year, we should all educate ourselves about how to react when our data ends up in criminal hands.