Loans Debts And Students
Archive for September, 2008
The Many Faces of Identity Theft at Modern Times
Sep 20th
Many adults know that identity theft is an increasing type of fraud. It’s also important for students to know this, however. People between 18 and 29 years old are the fastest growing group of identity theft victims.
People in this age group have grown up in a time when everything is online, and everything about them is open to the public. Students and young adults routinely post personal information in very open public settings. They often post more information than they probably should, and think nothing of it. They may post their full names, address, phone numbers, birth dates, employers, pets, and places they like to visit. This information leaves this age group vulnerable to identity theft. Although college students thing the information is harmless, criminals can collect the information and use it against them.
It isn’t just online behavior that leads to problems with credit. As many as one in four credit reports has errors. If you don’t review yours regularly, you may be taking someone else’s mistake.
If students – and the rest of us – aren’t vigilant about protecting their identities and credit reports, they can fall victim to identity theft and have their credit ratings destroyed. This will follow them for years to come. An inaccurate credit report can cause your interest rates and credit card payments to rise. It can take months or even years to fix your report.
Here are ten steps for students and everyone else to help protect their identities and credit reports.
1. Regularly monitor your bank, credit card, and loan statements. You should watch out for withdrawals or charges that you did not make. Contact your creditor or account holder if you are expecting a bill and it never comes. You should also contact your creditor if you see any unexpected spikes in your interest rates when you have been making payments on full and on time for every account. Unexpected spikes can be an indication that there are errors on your credit report.
2. Watch out for people who are lurking nearby when you are using an ATM, credit card, checks, or your computer. Some thieves will stay near you to try to steal your account numbers and PIN. These thieves are skilled at memorizing numbers quickly.
3. Delete any personal information and passwords that you have entered on a shared computer. It’s often impossible to tell who is going to be using it next, and it can be hard to know if the computer is infected with spyware. That spyware can collect information with every word or number you type.
4. Make sure that all correspondence you receive from creditors and your banks has the correct name and address. Contact the sender and ask why you received it if it has major name or address variations; you don’t necessarily have to worry about minor misspellings. Shred all documents with personal information when you throw them out.
5. Guard your laptop and the information on it. Many of the data breaches during the last six months have happened because laptops were stolen from their owners or caretakers. Always make sure that your laptop has password protection, virus protection, and has a firewall.
6. Just as you monitor your bank and credit card accounts, keep an eye on your credit reports. You should look for any names, addresses, or open accounts that are not yours. Dispute any inaccuracies through certified mail, and put fraud alerts on your reports. You can put credit freezes on your reports, but remember that you will have to pay to freeze it and then unfreeze it in the future.
7. Remember that your profiles and posts are never truly private. Many current and prospective employers will Google your name to find out more about you. Improper behavior could result in you losing your job or not landing your dream job.
8. Keep your Social Security number, passwords, and PINs safe. Never carry them in your wallet.
9. Realize that “phishing” scams exist. Never provide personal information – including your Social Security number, bank account numbers, or credit card information – to someone who gets in touch with you through unexpected telephone calls, e-mails, or social networking websites. These scams often seem authentic and urgent. They aren’t! Remember that your bank will not contact you through e-mail if there has been a breach in your credit card information information or account. They will not ask you for personal information through e-mail.
10. Don’t make it easy for thieves to crack your passwords. You should pick passwords carefully, and don’t publicize information that can make it easy for others to guess your passwords. Pet names, birth dates, hometowns, and interests, for example, are often used for passwords. If you put these bits of information online, others could see them and try to guess your password.
About the Author:
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Consolidate Student Debt
Sep 20th
Tips to Consolidate Student Debt
It’s challenging enough to personify a student now – and it’s equal tougher when you eventually graduate and are out in the real world. Before you recognize it, your student loans are proceeding to come collectable, and if you have numerous loans, particularly loans from many a lenders, you might suddenly feel as though you are in over your head. Luckily, in that respect is a path to consolidate student debt, making it a good deal easier on you.
What is Debt Consolidation?
What does it mean to consolidate student debt, you might ask? Well, oftentimes when you finish college or graduate school, you are going to have numerous different loans, because you likely had to take out a loan for every last semester you were in school. Maybe you swapped schools, or went someplace else for a spell, so you possess even more different loans from different lenders.
What it signifies when you consolidate student debt is to take every last of those loans, unitedly, and sell them to one agency. When this agency has bought all of your debts, they will pay them off at once, and you instantly owe this agency for that total. The difference is, when you have consolidated student debt you now owe just one loan to the agency, instead of many loans.
What Are The Benefits
If you are wondering what benefit it power bring to consolidate student debt, you are not alone. Many people don’t manage this because they experience that the agencies will charge them excess money and it won’t be worth it. The agencies you utilize to consolidate student debt in reality do charge you a fee, which is how they make their money, and they might have a somewhat higher rate of interest on the big loan you will now have from them. Nevertheless, it is in reality starting to benefit you. For one, your monthly payments will be drastically lowered if you consolidate student debt. Also, you will just be paying interest on one amount, and therefore in the long run your interest payments will be less.
Do You Want To Know How To Consolidate Student Debt
There are many a ways to go about it if you’d like to consolidate student debt. First of all, you should discover with your individual lenders to determine if they possess ideas or programs that you can exercise. After that, there are many a different agencies that can help you through this process. It is merely important that you figure it out through them, and determine which one is optimal for you.
About the Author:
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3 Worst Public Speaking Mannerisms – Are You Guilty?
Sep 16th
The moment is upon you – you have rehearsed your carefully written speech. You understand your audience’s interestes and you know their expectations. You’ve even gone the extra mile and have researched the demographic make-up of the assembled company. All you need to do now is perform a few vocal warm-up exercises and step out onto the stage.
Surely nothing could go wrong? Your delivery is smooth and engaging yet the audience seems to be quite distracted.
It could only be – your irritating mannerisms.
Surely not! After all, you don’t have any mannerisms! Do you?
It’s a sad fact that many speakers are completely unaware of small but annoying mannerisms that will spoil their carefully prepared speeches. Nothing will distract an audiences’ attention more effectively than the sight of a speaker constantly repeating an irritating action – a habit that will cause your words to be lost and your speech to be ruined.
Are you guilty of any of the following irritating habits? Be honest with yourself or better still, ask a trusted friend to tell you which annoying mannerisms you should look out for.
1. Are you a Leaner and Swayer? Many speakers continually shift their weight from one foot to the other, swaying first one way, then to the other. Others will rock forward and backwards from heel to toe as they deliver their speech. These movements are always performed unconsciously but can make an audience truly giddy. Make an effort to become aware of your movement and balance when speaking and work towards remaining upright.
2. Are you a Scratcher or Ear Puller? Perhaps on a sub-conscious level it may be comforting for a speaker to continually be touching or scratching their head and it may even help to calm taut nerves somewhat. It may be that some speakers believe that such actions convey the impression that they are giving deep consideration to their subject but unfortunately they are almost always wrong. Instead, always remember, scratching is catching and before long you’ll have the whole audience scratching too!
3. Are You an N.B. & C.? Otherwise known as a Nose Blower and Cougher. It may appear that the speaker is suffering from a heavy cold but the truth is that their frequent clearing of the throat and wiping of the nose is merely a nervous habit they have developed over time. These mannerisms are probably the most irritating ones for the audience and definitely the most frightening ones for any hypochondriac who may be sitting in the front row!
If you find yourself constantly needing to clear your throat, practice swallowing instead and always make sure that you have a glass of room-temperature water to hand during your speech.
We all have our own small mannerisms and they generally don’t matter at all. However, when delivering a speech to an audience, those small mannerisms will be magnified. So work hard to ensure that you are remembered as an excellent public speaker, without your little mannerisms, not an extremely irritating one.
Which one would you prefer to be?
About the Author:
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