COMPUTER TIP OF THE WEEK for all Windows users:  download the latest FREE version of Treesize!  I had some older versions of this that were just okay, but Ver 4.2 is amazing! This little utility fills a huge usability hole in Windows by scanning any portion of your file tree, reporting the sizes of every subfolder, and neatly sorting them by size. Unlike the old version I was using, this one is lightning fast: scanned my entire C drive in seconds!  
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tldr;  I managed to spend almost a week Getting (some of) My Affairs In Order.  The fireproof lockbox now has a justification for existing.

Two or three or five days ago I was inspired by The Internet to add a few things to the fireproof lockbox in the office closet. All that was in there was a folder with passports, birth certificates, and the like and one folder containing the giant abstract for the house. The Internet puff piece that crossed my digital desk suggested a few other obvious things to keep in there, like vehicle titles and emergency cash. Well, that sounds easy enough, right? Let's just add them.

But the most obvious thing to add was the Family Survivor Document and Password List that was started about 10 years ago and desperately needs updating. A lot of the updates are scrawled on the old hard copy in the pink binder, so they just needed to be transcribed. But the Password List had of course ballooned to the point where it needed its own document.  So I figured I'd start with that. I do, of course, have all my passwords recorded in various places, so I started with that. Because my record-keeping impulses tend more towards intermittently obsessive that truly organized, I naturally discovered that the multiply redundant places I had recorded certain passwords did not agree with each other. So I had to login to all of them to see which version was  correct. While I was at it, why not update some of the passwords on Loyalty accounts where I had carelessly reused the same password? That shoujld be easy, right? Which led to the unwelcome discovery that most of my credit cards and loyalty programs had changed their password requirements, in many cases forcing the use of email addresses as login names (which I HATE). So in order to change my password I had to abandon he handy "username" I had chosen and check/update my email contact info, which is surprisingly difficult to do on some of these awful websites. Alaska Airlines was excruciatingly difficult, eventually  resulting in my disabling Richard's account completely. I still have to call Customer Service to get that fixed. *sigh* But I did get the passwords updated to something unique on the accounts that still work.

Then I moved on to the main Family Survivor Document, which actually took a lot less time than the passwords. Although I had a hard time finishing either one because just as I was about to print the hard copy I thought of something else I had forgotten to add. 

Then I discovered that the giant abstract, although interesting as a historical document, does not include any actual DEEDS. I finally found a couple of extremely poor copies of our deed in a file folder marked "CLOSING DOCUMENTS" and just added that whole folder. Also, while I was at it, the Social Security and Medicare folders. And my latest insurance policies, which was one of the things I started out to do but had almost forgotten by this point. 

Then it occurred to me that I might as well throw in some digital media with backups photos and important files. That led me down the path of doing a little bit of file cleanup and reorganization, and I'm still in the midst of that. And that's when I downloaded the new Treesize, which was the high point of this whole process so far. 

tldr; if you are on Medicare and have Health Partners insurance you might want to read this. 
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Richard and I have a Medicare Advantage program with HealthPartners, which we have been generally quite happy with. Sufficiently so that I have become quite lax at doing that thing where you review your health insurance plan every year, looking for gotchas and unfortunate changes. This year I was surprised to receive a couple of shiny white debit cards in the mail. They just say "Health Partners" in big letters, but on careful inspection I spied "Choice Card" in tiny white on white embossed lettering. This forced me to start trudging through the murky pathways of the HealthPartners website looking for the explanation. I took one wrong turn, leading me to a completely different Choice Card that seems to be some sort of FSA? Nope, it's not that. Finally found it. Here's the link, as a public service for other HP customers who are currently staring in confusion at their unexplained new cards.

Guess what! It's a new benefit! A rather obscure and limited benefit, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth. This card can be used to pay for certain "expenses not covered by Medicare" up to $475/year!  You can only use it for 4 things: chiropractic care, prescription eye ware, hearing aid products from one specific company, and home-delivered meals from one specific vendor (but only right after you get  home from rehab care). The "Mom's Meals" benefit is hilariously niche, but the prescription eye ware benefit can apparently be used at any optical service. Perfectly timed, since I really need new glasses. Wow!

While I was at it, I followed a helpfully placed link from the Choice page to something labeled "OTC benefit" and discovered another hidden program that gives you $50/quarter for drugstore stuff: vitamins, bandaids, pain relievers, sunscreen, bedpans, etc. This one did NOT come with a card; you have to order online from the limited list of products on their special portal. But hey, it's free stuff that anybody can use: $400/year for the two of us. Nothing to sneeze at. I struggled through their extremely broken registration process, managed to get our accounts established, and verified that there is indeed $50 credit in each account. I placed an experimental order for a knee brace and a couple of replacement cane tips for Richard. Curious to see how long it will take to get here.

I also discovered through closer scrutiny of my plan benefits that Medicare insurance covers prophylactic dental care even if you don't spring for the ridiculously expensive extra dental insurance. We've been going to the same dentist for the past 30 years or so, and I never updated our insurance info when we went on Medicare (because I did NOT buy the dental insurance, so I thought it wasn't covered). So we've been paying out of pocket for exams and cleaning for 8 years when we didn't have to. D'oh!  Note to self: give insurance info to the dentist at next appointment.  

This almost never happens. Usually when a credit card company announces that they have revamped their credit cards to make them ever so much more valuable, they are at best taking something away with one hand while offering some unwanted new feature with the other. Not this time. Chase is replacing their popular Freedom card with a massively BETTER version called Freedom Flex. They've also upgraded their related Freedom Unlimited with dynamite new reward categories.

Freedom is the no-annual-fee card that gives you 5% back on different categories of spend every quarter. It still does that. But now you also get 3% back (year round) on dining and drugstore purchases, and 5% back on travel booked through their travel portal. The dining category is excellent, but 3% on drugstores is unprecedented. Do you know how much you can spend in a drugstore? Sometimes (but not often) you'll find drugstores in the rotating 5% category, but I've never seen a card that gave 3% back year round!

Best of all, if this is a new card you get a $200 Welcome Bonus and 5% BACK ON GROCERIES FOR A YEAR. That is a fantastic deal for a no-fee card! Hell, it would be a great deal on a card with a $95 annual fee. I already applied for one, and we'll be switching to that for our grocery purchases for the next year as soon as the card arrives.  

If you already have a Freedom card, you should call and get it upgraded for free to the Freedom Flex. Because it's not a NEW card you won't get the 1-year grocery benefit, but you get the other new categories.

If you have a Freedom Unlimited you get the new categories automatically without having to even call. Just remember to use it at drugstores going forward, and for dining (including takeout) unless you have a better option. Or just use it for everything, which is not only what Chase would like you to do, it's a good choice for that if you want simplicity. It gives you 1.5% back on all purchases with no annual fee, and now you get 3% on drugstore and dining to boot. 

And if you would like to apply for a nice new Freedom Flex or Freedom Unlimited, please let me know and I will send you a referral link. You get the same intro offer ($200 + 5x on groceries) and I get a referral bonus. 

I just found a clearly bogus charge for $15.99 to SEI*SOCCER.COM on one of our credit cards. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could have gotten that card number. It's a hotel credit card has been safely stowed in my "sock drawer" for 6 months, hasn't been used since the last time we stayed at that hotel chain. That was fortunate, since it made the charge stand out.

But this is a popular time of year for credit card fraud, since it is easy for smallish charges to slip by unnoticed with all the holiday shopping. So, if you use credit cards (or a bank debit card), double-check your statements.

So, apparently an Experian server was hacked a few weeks ago. Not the whole Experian database, just a section of it where they stored a bunch of sensitive information related to T-Mobile accounts. Not payment or credit card info, just all the information you give your phone company when you sign up for service (name, address, DOB, SSN, etc.). Apparently T-Mo was under the impression that Experian would use their special expertise to store this information for them securely. Right. They might as well have put it on a government server.

The silver lining is that every time my personal data gets compromised in a well-publicized data breach I get a free Identity Protection Service for a year or two. This time it's Experian's own "Protect My ID Elite." This looks better than the cheapo version I got from Target after their data breach a few years ago. About all that one did was send alerts every time I opened a new credit card. This one has all kinds of nifty services that I hope I never need, like a Lost Wallet service to help make frantic calls to credit card issuers and a $1 Million Identity Theft Insurance policy.

There's an Internet Scan service that promises to "continually monitor a vast number of online sources where compromised credit and debit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and other personal data is found, traded or sold."

It also includes quick and easy access to my Experian credit report. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to be 100% accurate. 

On Wednesday, someone got hold of my Amex Delta credit card number and went on a spending rampage.

On Thursday, the Amex fraud department called me to confirm some "questionable charges."  The activity started with a $3.00 charge at Tesco (a convenience store in England), and continued with about $1,000 worth of merchandise ordered from 4 or 5 websites. Now here's the amazing thing. The only charge that went through was the $3.00 at Tesco. After that, alarm bells went off and ALL the subsequent charges were put on hold until they could be confirmed (and presumably denied after I said that they were not mine).

On Friday I received my replacement credit card via Express UPS.

Wow.  I am impressed by the efficiency of the fraud-detection department.  I have no idea how my account got stolen.  I still have the credit card in my possession.  I almost never use it online, although I do have a couple of automatic monthly charges on that card (Netflix, USI).  I had used the card within the last few days, at Schuler's Shoes and Costco, so I'm inclined to suspect one of those.  But the nice lady from Amex said not to bother trying to figure it out - "There are so many ways they can steal your credit card number.  They can even do it electronically when they walk past you on the street."  Really?  They can do that?  I thought that was still in the realm of things to worry about in the future.  Yikes

I am both freaked out and reassured. Apparently the only thing keeping the entire massive structure of the credit card economy functioning is these fraud detection algorithms.

Has this happened to any of you?

This kind of follows from the previous post about charitable contributions. I noticed that one of the organizations I contributed to online depends on the DMA opt-out site for their own privacy policy. That's the Direct Marketing Associaton opt-out site. The most useful option is the last one, "Other Mail," which includes charitable solicitation. You can opt out of everything on the list at once (although of course the site "recommends" against that).

I'd been meaning to register here for years, but hadn't gotten around to it, so I finally did. I also followed the link from this site to OptOutPrescreen, a similar site that lets you opt out of those annoying unsolicited credit card offers. I checked a few fraud alert sites and they confirm that this is for real. It sounds a little dubious when they ask you for your Social Security Number, but apparently it's on the up and up.

I doubt that either of these registrations will STOP the junk mail, but it may slow it down. To my amazement, the National Do Not Call list actually worked, so maybe this will too.

I especially recommend the Credit Card opt out to my children, thorintatge and ambertatge, as I am tired of receiving pre-approved credit card offers in their names. *ahem*

When I got my totally unnecessary and undeserved Federal Tax Rebate check earlier in the year I said I was going to give it to charity. I still intend to, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I have some ideas, but wonder what other people would suggest. I would much prefer to give to organizations that offer a convenient, online option to opt out of junk mail and that will promise not to sell my name to other organizations.

I'm leaning towards the following:

Food Shelf: maybe Second Harvest, maybe the Minnesota Emergency Foodshelf Network.
Homeless shelters: Sharing and Caring Hands
Arts Organzations: HOTB, Intermedia Arts
Miscellaneous: Meals on Wheels, Toys for Tots, one of the Jewish charities that got shafted by Bernie Madoff.

One of the catchup things I did last week was meet with my broker to review my retirement plan, which I manage by a combination of inattentiveness and outright avoidance. Turns out I'm in better shape than many people my age, mostly because I accumulate money by being too disorganized to spend it on the things that it really needs to be spent on, like a new roof. Also, if I stash money away in places where I have to make phone calls or negotiate online forms [see below] to get at it, I just leave it alone.

Of course, meeting with A.J. ended up with new items being added to my list of boring chores to put off, such as selling some stock purchased through the employee stock plan and investing it in IRAs before the tax year closes. Unfortunately, QLogic announced record profits again, which for some reason always makes our stock plummet. [Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer, not a Wall Street analyst.] So now I don't feel much like selling the stock anymore.

So instead of that I guess I'll sweep some of the accumulated cash out of the pathetic money market fund where my brokerage puts extra cash and put that into IRAs. I think I can accomplish this with an email.

I also managed, finally, after 2 days of working at it and with help from a friend (you know who you are) to submit an expense report for my new Franklin planner. *whew* Isn't it amazing how much easier our lives are now that every little HR task is outsourced to a different online service provider? NOT. I miss the days when you just picked up a form in the HR office, filled it out, and turned it in.