Archive for ‘Financial’ Category

Show Me the Money — A 2025 Guide to Finding Forgotten Funds & Unclaimed Property

Posted on: December 1st, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

Whether you spend a small fortune over each Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend or you’re super-cautious with your dollars and cents throughout the year, I bet you’d like to have more money. And I bet you’d particularly like to have more of your own money — money that has been kept from you for some reason — back in your own pocket.

MISSING MONEY AND UNCLAIMED PROPERTY, REDUX

One of my most popular posts is one I published almost three years ago: Lost & Found: Recover Unclaimed Money, Property, and Savings Bonds. In it, I explained the basics of unclaimed property. To borrow from myself:

The term unclaimed property is what you’ll hear most often when searching for lost money in various types of accounts. Unclaimed property usually refers to funds that a government (federal, state, or local) or business owes you because you’ve, quite literally, left it unclaimed.

It’s possible that you’re so organized with your paperwork that you feel affronted that I’ve implied you might have just haphazardly left money sitting around. But I’m not saying you’re absent-mindedly leaving piles of cash wrapped in newspapers like Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life. (By the way, that $8000 deposit that ended up in Mr. Potter’s hands would be worth $121,762 in 2023 $132,913.23 in 2025! Maybe Uncle Billy should have tied the money to one of those strings around his fingers.)

Thomas Mitchell as Uncle Billy, searching the bank’s trash cans for the lost Savings & Loan deposit. Let’s boo Mr. Potter!

I posited the various reasons why money gets separated from its rightful owner.

Sometimes, you’re due a refund, but the refund sits so long that a company loses track of you. Several years ago, when I began working with a client, I had sorted through all of his bills and paperwork to figure out what we could discard, what should be filed, and what required action. Typically, that last category involves paying a bill, but in his case, we found that he was owed money. He and his late wife had opened a retail store credit card to purchase a service they’d later canceled. A prorated amount was returned to the credit card, but because they never used the card again, the balance just sat there, neither accruing interest nor being used, statement after statement.

Happily, in this case, one call to the credit card company (and many, many transfers between departments) later, and within a week, he had a check for the amount. Better yet, that credit card company doesn’t send statements in months when there’s no (positive or negative) balance, so it also meant that he had less paper clutter! 

Other times, you and your money are parted because you’ve done a magic trick and disappeared. Think of times when you’ve put down money, such as a security deposit for an apartment or a local utility account. The landlord or company holds your money as security, or collateral, in case you skip out on your payments. In many cases, that money is held in an interest-bearing account.

In the best case scenario, when you terminate your lease and cancel your utilities, you get back your deposit plus a little bonus (of interest) for your troubles. The problem is that too often (and particularly when we are younger), we’re so focused on where we’re headed that we miss out on what we are owed. However, if you left no forwarding address (and remember, in the olden days, when we moved, our phone numbers did not move with us), landlords and utility companies had no way to reach out and return that money.

In theory, that money is/should always be turned it over to the state.

These are only the most common examples of money that may have been left behind when you jetted off to the next part of your life. And, of course, most of us know the frustration of someone else not being clear about what or where valuable funds may be.

 

There are a variety of situations where your money might go unclaimed. Consider this a mental checklist to jog your memory of money that may have disappeared or been forgotten.

Financial Accounts

  • Abandoned bank accounts
  • Abandoned credit union accounts

It’s not uncommon to calculate how many outstanding payments will need to clear and leave only a bit more than that amount in a bank or credit union account you plan to close. The payments clear, and then the forgotten accounts often lay dormant, occasionally collecting interest.

Most bank and credit union accounts require some sort of activity — even just the deposit of $1, once per year — to be considered active. Banks won’t put in too terribly much effort before turning money over to the state.

Employment-Related Funds

It’s one thing to quit a job and leave behind forgotten leftovers in the break room fridge, but so many people manage to ghost their own money. 

  • Un-cashed checks or failed direct deposits — I’ve had clients who had been so overwhelmed and overworked that when they switched jobs, they forgot to cash their final paychecks. (Yes, even though most people are regularly paid via direct deposit, final checks are often issue with old-fashioned paper checks.)

I have also seen people fail to notice or remember — in the chaos of moving — that a final check was never actually direct-deposited; or perhaps that payment was issued, but the direct deposit failed to go through because the old bank account was already closed. I’ve seen all of these! And other payments may go un-deposited. Un-cashed checks might include:

    • paychecks
    • employment bonuses
    • refunds of expenses submitted to your employer
    • sales commissions
    • vendor checks
 

Poor Milton. They kept moving his desk, and the Payroll Department could never find him.

Investment Instruments

It’s common for people to have chaotic investments. I try to get clients to list all of their accounts, but often have to play detective.

When you’re fresh out of college, you may have a few savings bonds (far from their maturity dates) and nothing else to speak of. However, after a variety of jobs (particularly if you started working before the era of 401(k)s and Roth IRAs), you may have picked up (and then failed to roll over) a smattering of retirement accounts.

If you came into adulthood before mutual funds were really a thing, your investment portfolio may include a random collection of individual stocks, some of which are in DRIPs (dividend re-investment plans) and others where you randomly get checks for $1.53 or $4.52…which you try to remember to deposit and then find smushed in the pocket of your winter coat on the first cold day of the season.

Consider the following investment instruments you may have forgotten that you even had after a lifetime of cross-country moves:

People change addresses, firms merge or dissolve and then change names, stocks split or get sold off — whether they lost track of you or you lost track of them, it’s all worth tracking down.

Insurance Policies

Have you ever seen Gerber Life Insurance — yes, like the Gerber baby food. It’s whole life insurance advertised to parents to give their children life-long guaranteed coverage. Debating the pros and cons of getting life insurance for children is beyond the scope of this post; however, paying attention to organizing the documentation/paperwork for such policies is key.

After having been a professional organizer now for almost a quarter of a century, I have worked with many clients who, when they clear out their elderly parents’ homes, find random references or partial documents for those kinds of baby life insurance policies. In every case, the cash value of those policies have long-since stopped increasing in value.

Sometimes, they’ve been able to cash out directly but often the policies have been sold and resold to other insurers who have lost track of the policy-holders and turned the money over to the applicable state governments. (Are you noticing a trend? Even companies with everything organized by 21st-century computers don’t want to keep up with the nickels and dimes of seemingly abandoned accounts.)

Insurance-related money may be owed to you in the form of:

  • Matured insurance policies
  • Terminated insurance policies
  • Life insurance payouts
  • Annuities
  • Unclaimed insurance refunds — If the beneficiaries of insurance policies fail to claim death benefits, or policy-holders never cash refund checks (either because they never receive them or because they pile the mail on top of the microwave and it gets lost), that money goes unclaimed.

Legal Balances

If you won a million-dollar judgment, Paper Doll suspects you’d probably notice if you forgot to accept payment, but there are a variety of funds (usually far less than seven figures) that are legally yours but may be forgotten. When you go spelunking for unclaimed property, you may find you are due money for:

A client’s ex-husband once owed her a significant amount of back child support; she couldn’t collect because when the ex had arranged to be paid “under the table” so as not to have his wages garnished. However, when he won a significant judgment in an unrelated lawsuit, my client was able to receive what was due to her and her children because she had made the effort to keep the state agency overseeing child support enforcement updated whenever she moved.

  • Royalties owed for minerals, oil, gas, or other assets you own. (Your Grandma once owned land in Oklahoma or Texas? Think Dallas, but with more paperwork and fewer shoulder pads.)
  • Royalties owed for creative works, like published books or music, recorded performances, etc.

Have you ever heard of Sixto “Sugar Man” Rodriguez? He was a Mexican-American musician in the late 1960s and 1970s, whose songs focused on the societal difficulties facing those living in poverty. When his albums sold poorly in the United States, he ended his music career. Unbeknownst to Rodriquez, his music was so popular and influential in South Africa that it was said he sold more records there than Elvis Presley. But for decades, he wasn’t aware of, or paid royalties for, his talents — as told in 2012’s Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, fans even mistakenly thought he was no longer alive!

 

If you’re due royalties make sure you are findable!   

FIND GENERAL UNCLAIMED PROPERTY OR FUNDS

As I explained in the original post three years ago, there’s not one central database for all unclaimed property. Generally, unless the money you’re seeking is in a special category (see further below), you should start your search in the unclaimed property office for each state in which you have lived.

Begin with Unclaimed.org, the website of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators. (For detailed instructions for your search, see my original post.)

To search for multiple states simultaneously head directly to MissingMoney.com.

MissingMoney.com allows you to just type a first and last name, and all possibilities for that name, across all state databases, will come up.

FIND MISSING RETIREMENT AND EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Do you vaguely recall having some funds trickling into a pension or 401(k), but you’ve had several jobs, homes, and kids since then? Is it all fuzzy?

If you’ve kept meticulous records, you may have files about your old retirement accounts; if you’ve kept mediocre records, you may have an old address book with the names of former colleagues whom you could find on Facebook or LinkedIn, and ask if they remember what retirement benefits you were supposed to have. However, there are more official methods for tracking down your hard-earned benefits.

Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database

Did you know that the US Department of Labor’s Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database can help you find your lost or missing retirement funds? Run by the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), the database should be your first stop if you or a loved one has lost track of an old pension or 401(k). Per the website:

EBSA is helping America’s workers and beneficiaries search for retirement plans that may still owe them benefits by establishing a public Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database through the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. 

This database serves as a centralized location to find lost or forgotten benefits and get information on how to obtain those funds. Learn about the tools and resources available for you to recover your hard-earned benefits.

Visit lostandfound.dol.gov — but note that to access the database, you’ll need a valid ID-Proofed Login.gov account, first. 

Once in, you’ll be able to search for any retirement plans that were a) linked to your Social Security number and b) sponsored by private-sector employers and unions. The database includes:

  • Defined-benefit pension plans — any kind of benefit plan that guarantees either a lump-sum payment when you retire or a lifetime monthly payment, like an annuity
  • Defined-contribution plans — accounts that employees fund during the years that they work, such as 401(k)s, and which continue to grow while they work and after they retire.

The Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database doesn’t include Social Security benefits,  personal investments like individual retirement accounts (IRAs) or retirement plans sponsored or overseen by religious organizations or government entities. So, if you’re a senator or a nun (or, y’know, a court clerk or church secretary), this database isn’t for you.

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

Have you ever worked for a private-sector company or organization whose retirement plan went kaput?

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) Database, is responsible for holding any unclaimed benefits for current or employees where the retirement plan ended and not everyone got their payout. 

Search the database to find your benefit plan; just enter your name and the last four digits of your Social Security number. Once you verify that PBGC is holding your benefits, follow the instructions for submitting documentation to claim them. (Once again, a plug for getting your Very Important Papers organized).

Other Retirement Benefits Solutions

The National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits (NRURB) operates a free database to assist former employees, employers, and plan managers to find one another and ease the problem of distributing retirement benefits that have been forgotten (by the accountholder) or abandoned (by the plan administrator). They use Department of Labor data and information from employers to help identify lost and/or unpaid benefits.

Speaking of abandoned plans, the Department of Labor’s EBSA also operates an Abandoned Plan Search database to help you find a plan abandoned by its administrator. (Maybe those administrators need to hire some professional organizers?)

If you’re still having trouble securing your company-sponsored retirement benefits, you may want to contact the non-profit Pension Rights Center. They operate the U.S. Administration for Community Living’s Pension Counseling and Information Program, and if your company or pension plan operates in one of the thirty states they serve, you may be able to access their free legal services. 

Find Unpaid Wages through WOW

Did you know that if an employer breaks labor laws, the Department of Labor’s Workers Owed Wages program is empowered to try to recover your back wages?

 

If you think you may be owed back wages from your employer, search the WoW database. Don’t dilly-dally, though, as they only hold unpaid back wages for three years.

Find the database at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/wow.

FIND UNCLAIMED LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES

Unclaimed insurance payments are typically turned over to the state. However, there are some situations where money may be owed related to federal insurance policies.

  • VA Life Insurance Unclaimed Funds — The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a database for searching unclaimed insurance funds. The VA holds onto money it owes to current or former policy holders or beneficiaries of those policies whom they’ve been unable to locate.

When my father, a WWII veteran, died in 2018, I had access to the paperwork related to a life insurance policy he was given upon leaving the Army at the end of the war. Contrary to expectations when dealing with government agencies, I was able to resolve all of my questions with one call. However, had I not had access to any of the paperwork, the link above would have been my first stop.

Note: the database doesn’t include funds from Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI) or Veterans’ Group Life Insurance (VGLI) policies from 1965 to the present day. 

  • FHA-Insurance Refunds – Homeowners who previously had an FHA-insured mortgage may be eligible for refunds issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Click on the link above to access the HUD database. Scroll down and provide your name, FHA case number, city, and state.

FIND UNCLAIMED MONEY FROM BANKING & INVESTMENTS

Did your bank fail? What about your credit union? Were you scammed by someone like Bernie Madoff?

  • If you had money in an FDIC-insured bank that failed, you can search for your unclaimed funds at https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/funds/.
  • If your money was in a failed credit union liquidated by the National Credit Union Administration, the NCUA.gov site’s Unclaimed Deposits database can connect you to your funds.
  • Were you an investor parted from your money as a result of a bad-faith investment manager? The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lists “enforcement cases” where individuals or companies money to their investors. You can check the status of distributions to harmed investors at SEC Claims Funds. 

THINK OUTSIDE THE MONEY BOX

All of the categories described above cover unclaimed funds that someone else is holding. However, you may have money, or something just as good as money, hiding in your drawers and glove compartments and under the piles of papers on your desk: 

  • Unused loyalty points, rewards, and frequent flyer miles — These represent quasi-lost money, things with value but only if you use them. Bear in mind that some unredeemed points, rewards, and miles have expiration dates or may be considered abandoned if you don’t use them (or the apps/accounts) for a long while.
  • Unredeemed gift certificates, store credits, refunds, or vouchers from retailers service-based companies. Depending on the state in which you live, they may be treated as unclaimed property if they go unused too long. Remember that year Aunt Gertrude told you that she schlepped out in a snow storm to get you that gift card for for Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and a Toys ‘R Us gift card for your tiny human? Uh-oh. Too late now. Stores close or restructure, and value goes poof!
  • Contents of safe-deposit boxes — When people move or pass away, families may forget about the contents of old safe deposit boxes, and it’s very hard to reunite tangible property with original owners or beneficiaries. 

In short: unclaimed property is often “anything owed to you that you forgot existed.” Take time to search for whatever may be owed to you or loved ones who can no longer search for themselves.

Remember, unclaimed property comes in many forms, from many possible sources.

As always, when you keep good (and organized) records (with account numbers and names of institutions, and your own addresses over the years), the search and claim processes will be easier. When searching databases, consider that your identity (or that of a deceased loved one) may not have been quite so organized — check name variations: with and without maiden names, nicknames, initials vs. middle names, etc.) 

Good luck finding unexpected funds!

Organize and Lower Your Medical Bills: Spot Errors, Negotiate Costs, and Save Money

Posted on: August 25th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

Last week, after I shared How to Track, Lower, or Cancel Your Recurring Subscription-Based Bills, a number of readers and clients were curious about the bill negotiation services listed, and quite a few wished there were a similar service for other types of expenses. In particular, I kept hearing that people wanted help negotiating (and fixing) bloated medical bills.

Estimations vary widely, but according to the latest medical billing statistics, upward of 80% of (non-pharmaceutical) medical bills contain errors that end up resulting in extra costs. This is problematic for everyone: you get bills you can’t afford, the providers don’t always get paid what they are due, and it all leads to widespread mistrust of the healthcare industry, per Medical Billing Errors Statistics: Impact on Patient Trust – A Complete Analysis.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY ERRORS IN MEDICAL BILLING?

  • Complexity — The US healthcare system has a hugely complex set of billing procedures. The more complex any system, the more you introduce the possibility of mistakes. Errors could be made by healthcare providers in billing or by insurance companies in the process of reimbursing medical costs.
  • Failure to verify insurance — Although every doctor’s office and medical facility asks you for your insurance card, photocopies it, and queries whether your insurance has changed, that doesn’t mean that the person whose job it is to do the typey-typey will actually enter the information correctly. I’ve often seen clients have their old insurance companies/plans billed even after they’ve changed policies or gone on Medicare.
  • Data entry errors and poor medical coding — Did you know that 52% of denied claims are due to coding mistakes? And almost 70% of billing errors are related to coding mistakes!

When you go to the doctor or to a hospital, various staff members are responsible for documenting what happened (what lab tests were run, what medications were given, what procedures were performed, etc.).

Next, someone has to enter the codes for each of those tests, medications, or procedures by selecting the proper code (from thousands) and then typing that code.

Bad handwriting, mistyping, or miscommunication on the part of the healthcare worker(s), and mis-coding are all possibilities for introducing mistakes. In terms of miscoding, it can be an issue of typing the wrong code, outright, or unbundling (where they mistakenly bill for multiple coded procedures or services that should be covered by one comprehensive, collective code).

  • Poor training, disorganized billing procedures, and delayed filing — Healthcare provider offices generally do a great job at providing healthcare, but often struggle with hiring and maintaining a back office that handles billing and insurance issues.

One of my clients owned a (let’s call it) healthcare-adjacent office; a staffer involved in billing was unsure of some insurance procedures and had somehow failed to submit insurance billing for an entire subsection of patients for more than a year before the behavior was uncovered. How would you feel about getting a healthcare bill 18 months after services were rendered? How likely is it your insurance company would pay it?

  • Red tape — Every year, changes in the software (and now, introduction of artificial intelligence) in medical records software means new opportunities for someone, somewhere, to make a boo-boo.

 

It’s not just the billing department’s fault!

On top of the creation of such errors, the perpetuation of them is, sadly, laid at the feet of healthcare consumers (i.e., patients).

Yes, it’s the job of the various levels of administration in the healthcare community to stop making these errors, but in the end, it’s our responsibility to know what our insurance policies cover, review our bills when they arrive, compare the bills with our insurance coverage, research whatever seems like an overage, and question excess charges.

Yes, I heard you groan.

None of this means you’re stuck with massive bills. You have options for verifying the charges, lowering costs, and even getting help reducing and paying for correct bills. 

According to a 2023 University of Southern California study, 25% of individuals “who reached out for any reason had their bill corrected,” and a significant number were able to acquire a payment plan or lowered rates. 74% of those who sought help for a billing error reported the mistake was corrected, and of those who sought help with an unaffordable bill, 76% received some kind of financial relief. Among those attempting some kind of price negotiation, 62% got a lower bill.

So, it’s worth trying to solve the problem, but it all starts with organizing yourself to set the record straight! 

HOW TO DIY ASSESS AND NEGOTIATE YOUR MEDICAL BILLS

When a medical bill arrives, don’t be too quick to pay it. Instead, follow this path:

  • Examine your bill — Yes, you have to open your mail. I know it can seem scary, but just like you must see the doctor rather than just hoping an illness or injury will go away, you have to investigate your bills.
    • Are the dates of service accurate? Are you being charged for services on dates you weren’t even there? 

If you’re in the ER on a Friday night and the hospitalist (the doctor who oversees your case while you’re there) writes orders to admit you, but there’s no room available until Saturday at Noon, you might get billed for an ER visit on Friday night as well as a hospital room for Friday, Saturday, and however many more days you’re hospitalized, even though you never had a room on Friday. That can be a multi-thousand-dollar mistake!

    • If it says why you were treated or seen, does the description of services, procedures, or tests seem right? 
    • Is there something weird on the bill? People have been charged ridiculous amounts for “mucous recovery systems.” That’s a box of tissues. 
    • Are there outsized charges for toiletry items or “administering” over-the-counter medications? An overzealous keystroke could turn a 1 into a 10 or a 10 into 100 count, dramatically increasing costs.

Physician Photo by Online Marketing on Unsplash

  • Request an itemized bill — If you’re dealing with a hospital, the initial bill they send you is a big, fat summary that gives you no indication of what they’re saying they provided. Immediately call to request an itemized bill; if they give you guff, send a request via Certified Mail. Once you get the itemized summary, scrutinize it like it’s your job.
    • Review it in detail, line-by-line. Can you square the referenced services with your experiences? If you were unconscious or otherwise unaware of every type of treatment you received, you should still be able to note anything egregious. Are they saying they amputated a limb that you still have? That they removed an appendix that’s still inside you (or that you had removed several years previous to this claim)? I recently read about a woman who fought a hospital charge for a circumcision — for her infant daughter!
    • Do you see any duplicate charges?
    • Were you charged for something that should have been included? Most insurance plans don’t let surgeons charge for follow-up office visits within 90 days of a major surgery or 10 days of minor surgeries. 
  • Check to see if the coding is accurate — In addition to incorrect codes due to human error, fraudulent charges may come from “upcoding” where a procedure or treatment is coded as something more complex than what you received. Coding includes:
  • Cross-reference your bill and your Explanation of Benefits (EOB), whether on paper or in your insurance plan dashboard.
    • Has your medical provider already (and properly) billed your insurance company? If your bill seems Daddy-Shark-sized, it may be that the provider sent you a bill without having already processed the claim through your insurance.
    • Check to make sure the healthcare provider filed the claim with the right insurance company.
    • Look at your EOB to see if your insurance plan has rejected the claim. If so, you’ll likely see remark codes, letters or numbers next to why the claim was not paid. Somewhere in the EOB will be footnotes corresponding remark codes, clues to potential errors in the coding. I once helped a client figure out that her doctor’s office filed a claim stating that she’d had two flu shots, 30 days apart. She’d actually had one flu shot and then, the next month, the first of two Shingles vaccinations.
    • The remark codes may also tell you that the reason your claim was not paid is valid. For example, most insurance companies only cover an A1C blood test for people with diabetes every 90 or 120 days; while your provider’s office should know this and not perform tests more often, it’s ultimately your responsibility to make sure you know what your insurance plan will cover and call your provider’s attention to conflicts before you accept service.
  • Make a list of the issues in bullet-point form so that you are clear on what you want to explain and challenge. Take note of the claim number(s) so that the healthcare provider billing office and/or insurance company knows which claims you’re discussing.
  • Call your healthcare provider’s billing office. 
    • Be polite. It’s the old, “You get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar” routine, although nobody ever wants flies. But you do want fewer pesky charges.
    • Stick to the point. They can’t help you if they aren’t clear on the problem.
    • Detail what looks wrong, using your list to guide you. Let them know you think there are (or may be) administrative or medial errors in the billing and specify your evidence.
    • Ask for clarification — in writing, if necessary. 
    • Don’t agree to pay if you still don’t understand a charge, or think they’re still mistaken.
  • Dispute bills you think are still wrong with your provider and/or insurer. Consider seeking outside assistance (as described below).
  • Consider getting help from your favorite AI to draft a letter to the medical provider, hospital, or insurance company once you know what kind of solution you’re seeking. While I’m not not the biggest fan of artificial intelligence, this is an easy win. Rather than guessing at how to draft a letter that strikes the right tone, feed all of your information into the AI, prompt it with the end-result you’re seeking, and let Chat GPT or Claude take a stab at it.
  • Negotiate payment options, if necessary — If the bill is correct, you still have alternatives if you can’t afford to pay it now and in full. Many providers, particularly hospitals, will work with you to arrange payment plans, lump sum discounts, or even financial hardship assistance (also called charity care or uncompensated care). 

 

SEEK ASSISTANCE NEGOTIATING YOUR MEDICAL BILLS

DIY is great, because you reap all of the cost savings.

DIY is also awful, because you have to spend your precious time on the phone with medical billing department phone trees, weary employees, and insurance providers. If you’re still recovering from whatever caused you to need medical care, or if you have a chronic condition, this may use up all of your time, energy, and spoons.  

 
And, of course, if you are recovered and back to work, you’re probably trying to maximize your time to catch up on everything you missed while being waylaid by illness or injury.

How do you decide it’s time to bring in outside help?

  • If you’re feeling so overwhelmed by the process that you procrastinate on even picking up the phone, that’s a good indication that progress won’t be made without support. The longer you go without addressing bills that seem wrong, the less likely you’ll be to recoup mistaken or excessive charges.
  • If your bill is enormous or your insurance issues are complex, and you’ve got no idea where to start, get help.
  • If you suspect that the crazy-huge bill isn’t merely because they forgot to bill your insurance company but because there are errors or overcharges for which you don’t feel confident about your investigative skills, call in the experts.
  • If you’ve already attempted to negotiate wackadoodle charges or resolve disputes and all you’ve got to show for it is an empty bottle of Tylenol for your headache, sore throat, and cauliflower ear from battling billing departments by phone.

How to Find Experts to Help with Negotiating Medical Bills

If you’re overwhelmed by the DIY process, seek a professional. As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I have done the legwork with clients to help them handle the DIY portion of the medical billing nightmare. I’ve sorted and collated paperwork, helped clients draft letters requesting itemized billing, and sat by their side on speakerphone, helping interpret medical billing language and supporting them while they ask questions. 

However, this isn’t my area of expertise; while I’ve racked up many hours in solving my own and my clients’ medical billing headaches, it’s always best to call upon an specialist. Similarly, just as many of my NAPO colleagues who specialize in financial organizing may be able to offer support, so too may our fellow specialists in the American Association of Daily Money Managers (AADMM).

But your best bet, particularly if you’ve got frustrating, complicated, or huge medical billing issues, is to work with an expert.

Medical Billing Specialists

In general, seek someone using the professional title of medical billing advocate or medical bill negotiator.

This kind of specialist can review your bills for both obvious errors (like billing an elderly man for removal of an ovary or billing you for medication you never received and which would never be used to treat whatever you had) and mystifying coding errors, as well as instances of overcharging.

Then, with your authorization, they can negotiate with healthcare providers and insurance companies on your behalf to reduce costs.

Medical billing advocates and negotiators specialize in reviewing medical bills, cross-referencing them with insurance, and identifying errors (and instances of fraud). Their services also include negotiating with healthcare and insurance providers to correct the errors, obtain discounted rates, and sometimes get more beneficial payment arrangements.

To find a medical billing advocate to analyze and potentially negotiate your errant healthcare bills, start with the professional directories in this field:

If the sticky wicket of the billing problem is your insurance company, an associated organization is the Alliance of Claims Assistance Professionals and Advocates (ACAP), whose members provide medical claims assistance and patient advocacy for a fee. 

Note: some advocates and specialists will work on a contingency basis, taking a cut of whatever they save you; others will charge a flat fee. Before engaging the services of a professional, make sure you understand their billing methods.

Related Specialists

Additionally, the Patient Advocate Foundation (PAF) connects healthcare consumers and their families with case managers who can help with both health and expense-related support, including access to care, assisting with applications for health insurance and related government programs, appealing insurance denials, getting support for co-pays and insurance premiums, applying for free or low-cost healthcare programs, and obtaining billing discounts or setting up payment plans. 

Other professionals may also be able to provide support. For example, patient advocates (whether independent, associated with healthcare systems, or provided by your employers’ Employee Assistance Program (EAP)) may be able to walk you through the wonkiest parts of the billing and insurance and help you resolve questions and problems.

If you suspect fraud or are dealing with a particularly complex legal dispute, you may need to hire an attorney specializing in the legal side of resolving medical billing claims. And, if you do believe you’re dealing with an instance of fraudulent medical billing, you might want to contact the offices of your state’s attorney general or insurance commissioner.

ENGAGE A BIG MEDICAL BILL NEGOTIATION COMPANY

Between the time I started researching this post and publication, a number of the larger billing negotiation companies, designed to take advantages of scale to negotiate billing on a patient’s behalf, like CoPatient, have ceased operations. Still, you do have options. 

Medical Cost Advocate

Medical Cost Advocate (MCA) — In addition to medical bills, MCA also negotiates dental bills and health insurance claims. They also provide on-call advocacy for employer groups, and concierge healthcare advocacy services for families and executives needing more ongoing insurance and billing assistance than they have time to address.

Once you create a personally-identifying account profile (a step you can skip on future visits), use your login ID to share billing information, check the status of any bill negotiation, and review a final report of any achieved savings.

Start with some data entry. Confirm information about the patient (whether that’s you or your dependent), like date of birth, mailing address, phone number, etc. Include your insurance provider’s information (if you have coverage) to cross reference who has responsibility for which costs.

Next, either upload the bill or enter the billing information in their system so MCA has information about the medical provider, the procedure or services to be assessed and negotiated, the amount already paid and/or still due, and the status, such as whether you have submitted the bill to your insurance carrier.

You’ll also enter payment authorization for MCA’s negotiation services, approve the terms and conditions, and authorize a credit or debit charge (equal to the percentage of the savings they negotiate).

MCA charges 35% of the total savings achieved on negotiated medical bills, and takes nothing if not successful. When everything is complete, you’ll get emailed a savings report.

Note that Medical Cost Advocates won’t take on billing negotiations for costs under $600, so this is better used for big bills related to a hospitalization or root canal, not your doctor’s office co-pay.

MCA claims that their services typically save their clients anywhere from 20% to 50%. While there’s no guarantee your bill will be lowered, bill submission process is easy enough to make it worth your (small) effort.

Goodbill

Goodbill offers similar medical bill negotiation services but specializes in hospital billing.

Goodbill’s user interface is intuitive. You start with a simple screen that asks you basic questions about your experience and the billing. 

After you authorize Goodbill to access your hospital bill and medical records, they combine team expertise with Goodbill’s AI software to review and analyze your bill and medical records with the goal of identifying bogus, unnecessary, or inflated charges, bad coding, or related mistakes.

If Goodbill finds discrepancies between what they should have billed and what they did bill, they’ll sent you a draft of a formal negotiation letter, enumerating the mistakes and the possible savings. If you approve, Goodbill will forward the letter to the hospital and follow-up with negotiations as necessary until the problem is resolved.

Goodbill charges a fee only if they’re able to negotiate a discount. Goodbill takes 20% of the savings they find you, with a cap of $1,000.

 

If you’re unable/unwilling to follow the DIY approach to negotiated your costs in the first place, there’s no monetary risk to you to turn the problem over to either company.

DollarFor

Although DollarFor previously offered medical bill negotiation services, they have suspended this offering. However, they have a robust library of DIY negotiation tips and resources, including a hardship letter template, a sample negotiation script, and settlement letter template, worth your exploration.

MEDICAL BILLING IMPACT ON CREDIT HISTORY

Finally, know that medical debt no longer has the same impact on your credit score as before. As of April 2023, the major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) have made the following changes:

  • Debts smaller than $500 aren’t listed on credit reports and no longer impact credit scores.

  • Consumers have a one-year grace period before medical bills in collection appear on credit reports, providing ample time review, negotiate, and resolve disputes over medical billing and insurance errors.

  • Repaid older debts should be removed from your credit report. Unpaid medical debt older than one year and greater than $500 will still show up on your credit reports for up to seven years, potentially damaging credit scores. However, if you (or your insurer) repay medical debt already in collections, the credit bureaus will remove the debt from your reports.

How to Track, Lower, or Cancel Your Recurring Subscription-Based Bills

Posted on: August 18th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

Subscriptions aren’t just for magazines anymore. Financially speaking, a subscription is anything for which you have an ongoing expense for a non-essential service. And I bet you have a bunch of them.

According to a recent study by CNET, American adults spend an average of $90 per month on subscriptions. Additionally, another study found almost one-half (48%) of those surveyed registered for at least one free trial and then forgot or neglected to cancel.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

WHAT IS A SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER?

A subscription manager is an app or platform that centralizes information to help users gain better control over their finances and make more informed spending decisions. Most track, organize, and manage recurring payments for subscriptions by:

  • scanning bank and credit card information to identify subscriptions
  • listing all subscriptions in one place
  • tracking expense increases over time to help analyze spending patterns and identify opportunities to reduce costs 
  • organizing and sorting by subscription name, cost, billing cycle, or due date
  • identifying redundancies (like a standalone subscription for a streaming service as well as one acquired through an Amazon Prime 7-day trial)
  • setting up payment reminders before renewals or payment due dates (to help avoid late fees or unintended renewals of free trials or forgotten subscriptions) 

Additionally, some subscription management tools and apps can negotiate costs or assist in canceling subscriptions, making it easier to terminate services you no longer need. 

CONSIDERATIONS FOR CHOOSING A SUBSCRIPTION TRACKER

Price

Look for free options, or free tiers (or trials) on platforms that offer multiple levels. You can always upgrade if a premium tier offers a feature you find beneficial once you’ve mastered the free plan. Too often, we sign up for paid software-as-a-service plans and don’t them; a tracker will reverse that habit, so don’t go to all the effort to get rid of your other recurring payments only to end up with one for a tracker you don’t need!

Remember: platforms with services to negotiate a discount or rebate for a forgotten/unused subscription will take a portion — like a finder’s fee — of what they’ve saved you for the coming year. There’s no such thing as a free lunch; in return for picking up your lunch tab (that is, negotiating the refund after cancelation or price reduction) the app gets your pickle or a handful of your fries!

Security

In order to track your expenses to find recurring costs, these platforms must access your bank accounts and credit cards. Thus, protect your online safety by verifying that whatever platform you choose uses:

  • bank-level security
  • end-to-end encryption
  • two-factor authentication

Once you find a service that passes those tests, dig into their boilerplate security and privacy language to make sure the app doesn’t sell or share any of your personal information.

Features and Functions

A subscription tracker will analyze the data in your bank and credit card statements to identify recurring charges and create reminders about them. 

More advanced trackers should be able to cancel subscriptions with minimal input from you, negotiate lower bills on your behalf, and if part of a larger financial dashboard suite, help you quickly and easily create a budget.

Ease of Use

The point of a subscription expense tracker is to make your life easier. You want an app that’s intuitive so you’ll be able to add, delete, or change information or navigate your way around without much study. If an app is has so many bells and whistles that you have to consult Google or Chat GPT for instructions so managing the software becomes a second job, you won’t use it.

Read reviews to make sure it will be relatively easy to:

  • set up and sync the app with the information in bank and credit card accounts
  • identify recurring payments and set reminders to pay them
  • navigate the app
  • negotiate billing with relatively little input on your part
  • cancel accounts with minimal effort

DO I REALLY NEED AN APP TO TRACK, LOWER OR CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION COSTS?

Short answer? No, you don’t.

I call SiriusXM every year to lower my costs, and help clients do the same. I can’t fathom why anyone would actually spend the exorbitant full price, but the “negotiated” lower cost feels reasonable.

How to DIY Your Subscription Management

Canceling a subscription-based service (unless it’s a gym membership) is also fairly straightforward, but not fun.

 

If you’re organized, patient, and diligent, especially if you don’t have a lot of subscriptions, you can handle the process yourself:

1) Create a spreadsheet with columns for the subscribed service or license, how you pay for it, when it renews (monthly, quarterly, annually), and the cost.

2) Pull up the past year of bank and credit card statements.

Why a year? Although many subscription-based transactions are monthly, some are paid quarterly or annually. Streaming services generally charge monthly, but I have a marketing-based service for my business that, until last year, charged me quarterly. And once a year, I pay Apple for ongoing Applecare and an online service to protect this blog from the thousands of attempted comment spams. These subscriptions are easy to forget!

3) List your recurring expenses, starting with your most recent statement.

Run your fingers down the transactions, and each time you spot a new one, log the key elements.

4) Work your way through a statement until you’ve captured every recurring expense until you’ve reviewed a year’s worth of statements and aren’t finding previously un-logged subscriptions. You will find more than you realized.

5) Repeat the process with every bank account and credit card statement.

6) Group the recurring expenses in an appropriate category. For example:

  • Entertainment — streaming video and audio, paid podcasts, Patreon memberships
  • Utilities — telephone, cable, internet, security systems
  • Fitness — gym, online workout classes, premium apps for devices like Fitbit or Peleton
  • Health — supplement subscriptions, concierge medical services
  • Food — meal prep services, food delivery services
  • Professional expenses at the paid tier — Zoom Pro, Evernote, AI tools, Microsoft 365

7) Evaluate each item by category.

  • Are there duplicates, like an ad-supported Hulu subscription offered through your cable company as well as a paid bundle for Disney+ and Hulu?
  • Do you have unnecessary subscriptions, like a membership to a gym where you no longer live?
  • Do you have subscriptions that you never use? Are the apps are no longer appealing? Does something make them difficult to use? Do you just need someone to guide you until you master it and take advantage of what it has to offer?

8) Contact each vendor to negotiate costs or cancel services you don’t want to accept as-is.

Whew. There are several disadvantages to this process.

  • It takes time. If you call, you may have to navigate a complex phone tree, repeatedly hearing how important your call is, and sit on hold for eons.
  • They may give you a hard sell or push you to upgrade, convincing you that your cable and internet costs will decrease if you add cell service through them, but then you’d have to port your number from your original cell company, which you may like, lose your legacy status, and have to deal with those annoyances, and may find your rates going up a year hence. Be strong!

Recently, I worked with a client with cognitive decline; they sign up for services the don’t need; we call, they authorize me to speak on their behalf, and usually, we accomplish our goals fairly easily.

However, one company that keeps calling and tricking her has a habit of asking invasive and unnecessary questions, over and over, about why we wants to cancel and attempts to scare us into what will happen without this expensive auto part protection on the 11-year-old car that’s almost never used.

Having more moxy than Chandler Bing, I just keep insisting that we does not want the service anymore, and by law we have the right to cancel. (Occasionally, I have to invoke the possibility of calling the Attorney General of the state in which they’re headquartered.)

  • It involves talking to other people. If you’re an introvert (or a young millennial or GenZ), the idea of having to talk to someone on the phone may nauseate you.
  • It’s frustrating to talk to a bot (or an online agent typing from a bot-like script).
  • You’ll still have to monitor your bill to make sure that your charges are reduced or stopped.
  • You’ll have to schedule reminders to prompt you to cancel free trials before you get charged.

Can you pause subscriptions instead of canceling them?

Maybe you’d rather temporarily stop paying for a subscription while you can’t use the service. For example, when my car was stolen [Organize to Prevent (or Recover From) a Car Theft], I didn’t want to pay for Sirius XM for the two months my Kia was being repaired. I paused my subscription, but they sent me a notice after four weeks that they were going to start charging again, and I had to call to re-pause it.

There are a few reasons you might want to pause instead of cancel:

Maintain your viewing or listening history — Got a busy few months at work and won’t be able to watch your favorite shows? Maybe you’ll be traveling in the Australian Outback and won’t have cell signal to listen to streaming music and podcasts? When you’re ready again, you want your apps to show you what episodes you left off at and what’s on your to-be-watched lists.

Avoid the re-subscription process — If you can pause your subscription, returning to the service will be much easier and you won’t lose any of your preferences settings. 

Eliminate guilt over paying for services you don’t use — Whether it’s a gym membership you can’t use while healing from a knee replacement or a streaming service you won’t watch while traveling or working, this can be a pause that refreshes.

Use a pause to “churn” streaming television services. When you’ve watched everything you want to see on Netflix, pause your subscription for six months and binge all the streaming Star Trek Paramount+ has to offer. (Strange New Worlds is fabulous!)

  • Hulu lets you pause for up to 12 weeks.
  • Amazon Prime Video lets you pause indefinitely during the cancellation process. Note: you must pause all of your Prime benefits. 
  • Netflix has no official pause feature, but canceling your subscription provides a 10-month grace period for your account and viewing history.
  • Disney+ is rolling out the ability to pause subscriptions
  • Sling TV, Fubo, and YouTube TV all have pause features.

Be creative! Call any service you’re paying for but underusing, and ask whether you can pause instead of cancel. You never know which companies will be eager to keep you on with hopes and expectations you’ll return.

Call any service you're paying for but underusing, and ask whether you can pause instead of cancel. You never know which companies will be eager to keep you on with hopes and expectations you'll return. Share on X

Pause Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Does this DIY approach give you a headache?

Reduce pain points by dealign with the subscriptions on one credit card at a time, or make one call a week. Or change all recurring expenses so that they go to just one credit card on which you otherwise never charge anything, making it easier to manually track expenses going forward.

But you’ll still have to call and negotiate on your own.

YOUR SUBSCRIPTION MANAGEMENT OPTIONS

If you just want someone to cancel your subscriptions but your mom isn’t willing to do it for you, try:

Billshark

Billshark — will cancel or negotiate internet, wireless, streaming TV and satellite radio, and audiobook subscriptions. They even handle Dollar Shave Club and StitchFix! It costs $9 per canceled subscription, and 40% of your total negotiated savings, capped at two years (so check the value of what you’re canceling against the costs of using the service as a personal expense hitman).

Billshark doesn’t track expenses; rather, you upload a bill and they negotiate on your behalf; for cancellations, they try to negotiate credits or refunds. They claim a 90% success rate and take no fee if they don’t succeed in saving you money. They also track your savings’ expirations and automatically restart negotiations to keep you at the best rate.

Billshark may uncover better rates if you change plans, but seeks your authorization to make changes, and will never lower your service level, though sometimes, they can “expand services (higher speed, more channels, etc…).”

  

If you want it all — an entire financial suite for tracking your recurring expenses (and more) but also want help negotiating or cancelling services, try:

Rocket Money

Rocket Money (iOS, Android, web browser) — Previously called TrueBill, RocketMoney is one of the biggest names in this realm. Rocket Money’s basic plan is free; the Premium tiers are $6-$12/month with a 7-day free trial.

The basic level links bank and credit cards to the app, identifies recurring payments, and sends alerts if your checking balance goes below, or your credit card spending exceeds, a pre-arranged amount. 

Rocket Money Premium include negotiating bills, canceling unwanted subscriptions, and tracking net worth and credit scores (VantageScore 3.0 credit score and Experian credit report), as well providing auto savings, customizable savings categories, and unlimited budgets.

Rocket Money retains 35% to 60% of the savings earned on bills it negotiates. 

In terms of security, Rocket Money uses an encrypted token to access transaction data and uses Plaid API (so login credentials aren’t stored in the Rocket Money system). It hosts its servers at Amazon Web Services and provides bank-level 256-bit encryption. 

Hiatus

Hiatus (iOS, Android, web browsers) — The basic Hiatus plan is free, while Hiatus Premium costs $9.99/month or $35.99/year. Unlike many of the other apps, Hiatus does not take a percentage of the saving you get from its bill negotiation services.

Hiatus is designed primarily as an app for budgeting, letting you set limits on spending for streaming services and displaying spending over the prior week/month/year. However, its free tier includes a subscription tool for tracking streaming services; you can manually input anything not pre-set in the app.

To use the subscription cancelation and/or bill negotiation service, upgrade to the Premium.

Hiatus protects user financial data with 256-bit SSL encryption.

 

One Main My Money (Formerly Trim)

One Main My Money (web browser) — is free, but it isn’t a traditional app. Instead, you access your account via the web and communicate with agents via SMS text messages or Facebook Messenger. 

OneMain My Money links to all of your credit and bank accounts and then locates and cancels unwanted subscriptions (including phone, internet, cable, streaming services, and gym memberships) and will negotiate bills with a service fee equivalent to 33% of any savings recouped.

For a separate fee,OneMain My Money will identify less expensive auto insurance rates and negotiate bills. There’s also a Simple Savings high-yield savings account with a 4% annualized bonus on the first $2,000 you save.

OneMain My Money employs 256-bit SSL encryption and two-factor authentication.

OneMain My Money has an intriguing approach, but I advise against using Facebook Messenger to communicate about your finances!

  This the least informative but most adorable of all the subscription tracker videos.

Albert

Albert (iOS, Android, web browser) — In addition to budgeting and investing services, Albert has bill negotiation and cancelation services. It automatically scan bills found in checking or credit card accounts for extra savings, or you can submit a bill for the expert negotiators to process. Albert costs $14.99/month after a 30-day free trial for a Basic plan, $19.99 for a Standard plan including data protection, credit score monitoring and more; a $39.99/month Albert Genius plan is required for subscription negotiation and canceling. 

If you really want a subscription tracker to keep you focused on how much you’re being charged, for what, and when, but don’t need help with canceling or negotiating, subscriptions there are a variety of options:

Pocketguard

Pocketguard (iOS and Android) — PocketGuard has a free 7-day trial and a free version that’s kind of hard to find (see video below); for unlimited categories and bank connections, rollover budgeting, subscription tracking, and customized financial goals, upgrade to PocketGuard Plus for $12.99/month or $74.99/year.

Pocketguard is primarily a budgeting app, picking up where the late, lamented Mint left off. It links to your various accounts to track income, ongoing expenses, and savings goals and provide guidance on suggested daily spending limits in the “Leftover” section. It tracks expenses and categorizes them (though you can customize the categories). Pocketguard also alerts you to approaching billing due dates and potential fraud situations.

Pocketguard partners with Billshark to negotiate lower bills and takes an undefined cut of the savings.

PocketGuard uses bank-level encryption, and limits access through both PINs and biometric methods like FaceID and TouchID. Users can automatically connect and import data from their accounts to Pocketguard using Plaid or Finicity. At the Plus tier, add cash accounts manually and track them, and get a debt payoff plan.

The guidance page for how you log and mark Pocketguard’s bills makes it seem possibly more laborious than my DIY model. Your mileage may vary. For more, financial coach Brittany Flammer has a great updated review. 

  

Track My Subs

Track My Subs (web browsers) — This Australian app lets you track up to ten subscriptions on the free plan; paid plans range from $10/month for unlimited subscriptions to $30/month for enterprise-level plans for multiple users.

Track My Subs is marketed for small business use, but the website can can be used by individual consumers, making it an interesting option for solopreneurs. There’s no mobile app; instead, it’s browser-based, and you do the labor: enter your subscriptions, periodic costs, and due dates. It supports multiple foreign currencies, and your own bills can be converted to a “home” currency.
 
Categorize subscriptions however you like, and use the color-code calendar view to track payment dates and the generated graphs of subscription expenses to analyze your costs. You’ll have to do your own negotiations and canceling. One of my favorite tech guys, Steve Dotto of Dottotech, explains why he likes Track My Subs:

 

Pocketsmith

Pocketsmith (web browsers; mobile apps are not fully-functional) — Not to be confused with Pocketguard, Pocketsmith has a free level with six months of projections for two accounts and twelve budgets, and you must manually import expenses. For $9.99/month, on the Foundation level, you can automatically import transactions, and have unlimited accounts and budgets. There’s also Flourish ($16.99) and Fortune ($26.66) levels for finding and organizing transactions, as well as budgeting, projecting, cash-flow forecasting, and reporting. If you miss Mint, this finance-management option is robust and has bank-level security with 2-factor authentication.

Quicken Simplifi

Quicken Simplifi (iOS and Android) — There’s no free tier or trial, but you can request a refund within first 30 days of your $5.99/month for a month-to-month subscription or $2.99/month for an annual subscription (billed annually at $35.88). 

Simplifi is a budgeting app that can track subscription spending; it also offers automatic budgeting, shares spending insights, and tracks goals. Customizable reports track income, savings, and spending, income and your personalized spending plan adjusts in real-time. There’s also an investments dashboard, refund tracker, and credit monitoring function.

Simplifi syncs with bank, credit card, and investment accounts, loans, and financial data from bank servers transmitted using 256-bit encryption.

Monarch Money

Monarch Money (iOS, Android, web browsers — Identifies and tracks recurring bills and subscriptions, and alerts users to upcoming payments. Monarch Money is designed as a comprehensive financial planning tool, with a focus on budgeting, investment and net worth tracking, and long-term financial goals. There’s a 7-day free trial, after which it costs $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year. (There’s a 50% discount for the first year with code MONARCHVIP.) 

Other apps and financial dashboards for tracking subscriptions include:

Subtrack (iOS and Mac only) — This privacy-focused app lets you quickly add subscriptions from a pre-existing list of 300+ options or create your own and manage them by tag. Customize themes and icons, get detailed spending insights, drag-and-drop information, and sync with iCloud.

Origin (iOS, Android, MacOS, and web browsers) — This is a full financial dashboard with elements for investing, net worth tracking, forecasting, and estate planning. After a free trial, the monthly plan is $12.99; an annual plan is $99.

Subscriptions (iOS, MacOS) — Focused solely on subscriptions, this app organizes subscriptions using categories, due dates, tags, and payment accounts, and offers comprehensive analytics with summarizing charts. It supports more than160 currencies with daily updated exchange rates, and has a widget for reminders of upcoming payments. It’s $1.99/year, $7.99 for a lifetime license, or $14.99 for a lifetime Family license.  

Subby (Android-only; don’t confuse with similarly-named Apple App Store app) —The basic level (with ads) is free; an ad-free tier is $2.99. A customizable interface makes it easy to manually enter an unlimited number of subscriptions, record which account they’re associated with, and get notifications about upcoming payment dates. 

Credit Card Subscription Management

Finally, you may find that your credit cards have subscription managers embedded in their mobile apps. For example, Capital One’s app has a full suite of subscription management tools through which you can track or block expenses, and even cancel subscriptions.

How do you manage your subscriptions?

Paper Doll Investigates Birthday Freebies: The Hidden Cost of Free Stuff

Posted on: March 17th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

My birthday was last week. I don’t need to say exactly how old I am; let’s just say I was born sometime between the Pleistocene Era and the invention of the internet. I came into the world with big mouth (as evidence below) and a fondness for sharing my thoughts. 

Paper Doll and Paper Mommy, mid-March 1967

Birthdays are nice. They come with gifts and cake. In my case, they come with cheese, too. All my favorite people know how much I love cheese, and Craig, my friend since grad school, has started a tradition of sending me a box of 50 mini (3/4-ounce) wrapped Cabot Seriously Sharp white cheddar cheeses every year through Vermont’s Dakin Farm. 

In the 21st century with relatively little effort on one’s part, birthdays can also come with freebies. So far this month, I’ve received emails and texts alerting me to the following birthday freebies and discounts:

Birthday Food Freebies

Birthday Non-Food Freebies

  • The Container Store — 15% off
  • IKEA — $10 off any purchase of $10 or more
  • Kohl’s — $5 off
  • Lane Bryant — $20 off any purchase of $20.01 or more (Ample-bosomed ladies, this is definitely the big ticket winner!)
  • Target — 5% off any shopping trip (and yes, I acknowledge Target’s “issues”)
  • World Market — $5 off as well as a separate 15% off

By now, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with organizing?

FREEBIES: A DOUBLE-EDGED SLICE OF CAKE

I didn’t have to go to much effort to secure these freebies and discounts. Most apps and reward programs ask for your birthday when you sign up. We can debate whether giving up our month and date of birth to a corporate entity is an invasion of privacy (and whether it’s worth it to get a Bloomin’ Onion or a Chocolate Thunder from Down Under).

By the time my inbox finished shouting “Happy Birthday!” I felt less like the birthday girl and more like a walking coupon book. Birthday freebies, and freebies in general, feel like a win. And when I nibbled a bite of cinnamon coffee cake or try on a deeply-discounted article of clothing I coveted, but didn’t want to splurge on, I felt like a winner.

But these freebies can come with strings attached — financial, organizational, and productivity-related strings. 

Obviously, birthday freebies are a marketing tool. We generally ignore that, though, as we all get that little dopamine rush when someone (even a random corporation) recognizes our birthday.

And we all love “free” things, even as we recognize that being the object of a marketing campaign means that, while we are not necessarily paying for something with money, we are paying with our loyalty and our attention. As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.

Advertisers are buying our attention; rewards programs are buying our loyalty. Conversely, my grad school friend Craig is only getting my good will and my resplendently awful — or awfully gouda — cheese puns in my thank you cards.

Maybe you feel like you’re wise to the freebie game, but there are some sneaky gremlins hiding among the balloons and presents.

The “I’ll Just Spend a Little Extra” Trap

Let’s say your freebie gives you a free fancy burger, like the Fried Mozzarella Burger at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar. (It’s my go-to, with the Impossible Burger pinch hitting for the meat version.)

You’re probably not going out to eat by yourself. Yes, you may make a Starbies run on your own, but you’ll probably bring your spouse or significant other, your kids, your bestie, or whomever is available so you don’t have to eat dinner alone while scrolling your phone. On one hand, this prompts a social activity; on the other, depending on the economics of those with you, you may be digging into your wallet. (I mean, when it’s not your actual birthday; on that day, people are likely to treat you.)     

Second, everything on this particular menu is standalone. Who eats a burger (even a plant-based one) without fries or onion rings or, in this case, fried pickles? So, you’re going to pay for that. And when you’re having a burger, are you really going to wash it down with water? You probably want a cola, or perhaps an adult beverage. 

And hey, it’s your birthday! (Or, at least it was when you found out about this freebie). On your birthday, or whenever you’re dining out for a special occasion — even if that special occasion is just that you’re dining out — you’re going to want a delicious dessert, too, even if it’s not your habit to get dessert.

Last week at the Greek restaurant, my dining companion had a Bananas Foster cheesecake and I had a baklava cheesecake. And I barely looked at the price because it was a special occasion.

It’s rare to get a free food item and not end up buying a beverage, a side dish, or a dessert.  Suddenly, that “free” molten lava cake costs you $24.99 in dinner, beverage, tax, and tip. That “free” milkshake? It came with a $15 burger and a side of buyer’s remorse.

When you get a freebie, what you “spend” is almost certainly going to dig into your financial budget, but it’s also draining your calorie or carbohydrate budget.

The “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” Effect 

Freebies create a sense of urgency: “If I don’t grab this TODAY, I’m missing out!” 

I received some of the notices on the first of the month and they are good for all of March; others I received on my birthday and are good for thirty days after. Just a few of the meals are only good until the middle of the last week of March, and one, for Starbucks, had to be used on my birthday. (My dinner with a friend at my favorite Greek restaurant just happenned to be next to Starbucks, which made that easy, but some years, I’ve been known to take a Starbucks run at 10 p.m. just to grab my freebie.)

If you aren’t organized in your approach to taking advantage of them, you may feel pressured to go out chasing your freebies like they’re Pokémon and —  spoiler alert — you can’t catch ’em all.

 

This attitude can lead to impulse shopping. You plan to just use the $5 off at a store to buy something you want, but maybe when you get there, the item you had in mind isn’t in stock. Or maybe you didn’t have anything in mind (beyond getting something worth $5), so you roam the aisles and end up buying something random you didn’t need because you’re not going to be cheated out of your opportunity to get something for free!

This doesn’t just apply to birthday freebies, of course. Sometimes you’ll see a great deal in an ad, and you’ll think, “Ooh, SuchAndSuchAStore is having a 30% off sale; I have to go!” But unless you were already interested in buying something that you know they have, and you were just waiting for a convenient time to go, that sale is sneaking into your subconscious, and you’re not going to leave the store without some purchase, even possibly something you didn’t (and still don’t really) want or need.

The Clutter Conundrum of Freebies

Your voicemail is full. Why?

Your junk drawer called — it’s staging an intervention. (Speaking of which, this is a good time to plug a classic Paper Doll post, Is Your Junk Drawer a Drunk Drawer? 3 Steps to An Organized Junk Drawer.)

Oh, and your pile of free T-shirts called — it’s tired of being the wardrobe for your imaginary gym life.

This is less of a problem with birthdays freebies, as you already participate in the rewards programs of all of the companies inviting you, their loyal customer, to partake of their largesse in wishing you a glorious natal day! And what they’re offering you is something in the general area of what you already want — food you like or the kind of merchandise you already buy.

But if you’ve ever gone to a conference, a convention, a fair, a festival, a workshop, or anyplace that they were giving away free swag, you know what those kinds of freebies that pile up:

  • pens — The ink will dry up before you’ll ever use them
  • canvas bags  — Your trunk is already overloaded with more canvas bags than any amount of groceries you could possible tote in them — or even afford. You don’t need to adopt every orphaned tote bag on the planet!
  • keychains  — How many keychains does a person need? That’s why the extras end up in your junk drawer!
  • T-shirts promoting somebody else’s business, so that you becoming a walking billboard (which is why you never wear any of them in public)
  • candles — It may be adorable or smell delicious until you realize you’ve collected enough unused free candles to illuminate the final season of Stranger Things.

The Time-Suck Spiral of Freebies: What Is Your Time Worth? 

Hunting down all of your freebies takes time and energy.

Let’s go back to what I said about feeling that you need to “catch ’em all.” That prompts you to run errands to places you might otherwise have skipped. For example, while I love Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, the only Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor is downtown, and I don’t get there very often. If I want their ice cream (and when don’t I?) I could go to the corner grocery store and buy a pint; but with self-induced pressure to use up all my freebies, I could be tempted to come up with a reason (OK, an excuse) to go downtown.

But I’d be missing something important. My time has value!

I don’t have any errands to run downtown. Do I need to use up the time and gasoline to go there just to get a scoop of ice cream?

Consider this: if you’re driving twenty minutes for a free coffee or pastry, is it actually free?

Develop a Freebie ROI Rule. Discern what the return on your investment is, in order to figure out if it’s worth the effort.

To be fair, it might be. If you’re an overworked, over-scheduled parent, taking advantage of a food freebie like a coffee or an ice cream doesn’t just mean you’ll get a food treat at no cost. It means you get a reason — or yeah, an excuse — to put yourself first. That round-trip drive, and that time to a far-away store or coffee house and the time to enjoy it, might very well be the only “you” time you get all week. You have this stranger on the internet’s permission: take inner peace where you can get it.

The only way, for sure, that you will know whether it’s worth your time to collect on your freebie is that if you make sure you remember that your freebie is an option, not an obligation.

HOW TO ENJOY FREEBIES WITHOUT THE CHAOS

It doesn’t seem like birthday freebies were this chaotic a decade ago, or even just before the pandemic. It feels like it’s really become a key marketing technique to get people into restaurants and stores. Embrace them, but employ caution.

Be Organized

At the start of March, I made an inbox folder and routed all birthday freebie/discount-related emails to it. Once I had several, I made two lists, one for edible freebies and one for merchandise freebies.

Most of the emails alerted me to freebies in the apps, but this is one of those times where Paper Doll really prefers paper. I printed the pages of the emails with essential info: QR codes, bar codes, deadlines, and crucial legalese. I made note of the expiration dates in the upper right corner of each printout, separated officers by food and non-food, and sorted them with the earliest expiration dates on the top of the stack.

Of course, I could have just as easily routed the emails to Evernote and set a pre-deadline reminder on each note. A short list of the freebie and expiration date maybe organized enough for you.

On my actual birthday, I got a whole new slew of alerts, and followed the same procedure, so what I needed to attend to the soonest was at the top of each clipped stack. 

I’m keeping the folder in the car, so if I unexpectedly find myself near the place to redeem the freebie, I’ll have what I need.

This doesn’t mean I’ll absolutely take advantage of each birthday freebie; it just means I won’t miss any opportunities due to the clutter or chaos of announcements in random places.

Be Selective

Prioritize freebies you genuinely want or will use.

There are some apps or accounts I have because I needed to take advantage of a very specific discount or availability of something that I’ll never need again. Maybe it was for buying a gift for an ex-boyfriend who is no longer in the picture. (Who’s to say?)

Just because you have the opportunity to use a freebie (really and truly) doesn’t mean you have to. You have options:

  • Ignore it — Toss out the mail or close the app, and just don’t think about it. (Yes, if you’re a Frugal Felicity, that may be difficult, but Paper Doll gives you permission.)
  • Go halfsies — Don’t feel like you have to make an immediate decision. Look up the restaurant menu online and if something appeals to you, order just the free item in the app and arrange for curbside pickup so you won’t be tempted to eat/buy more than you want. For a store, surf the app or the website and see if there’s anything you were already planning to buy. If so, let the idea percolate and see if it boils over or your better angels turn off the burner. If not, let the freebie expire.
  • Arrange to let a friend use the freebie or discount. — Even if you have to go there with your friend, you get the benefit of their company without the obligation to spend from your financial or caloric budgets.

Declutter as you go. If a freebie isn’t useful, set it free or find a way to make it a blessing for someone else. But as you do acquire tangible things with your freebies, make an effort to toss whatever is being replaced.  

Set a Spending Limit

Decide in advance how much you’re willing to spend when redeeming a “free” item. 

This might be a monetary amount you’re comfortable with because of your actual budget, or you may just want to keep yourself from going hog-wild with temptation.

Sometimes when I’m bored or in the neighborhood and waiting for an appointment, I’ll go into Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, a sort-of factory discount store and window shop for entertainment value. But I will set a dollar limit in advance — usually $15, but sometimes even $5 or $10. I can afford more, thank goodness, but I’m much more discerning if I’ve got that limit in mind. If I really want to spend more, I know I can, but the limit forces me to be mindful, and I’m more likely to leave without that impulse purchase. (And of course, I can always come back the next day if I’m  hankering for a purchase.)

Similarly, you may want to set a caloric budget when taking advantage of an edible freebie. I’m diabetic, so I already know that I have a limited number of carbs I want to eat at a meal. If I’m going to a restaurant with amazing desserts, I’ll probably opt for seafood for dinner to use my carb count for cake; if the desserts aren’t tempting, I am much more likely to get pasta or something else equally carbalicious.

That free caramel macchiato will feel less like a win when you add a muffin, a sandwich, and a reusable cup that’s destined to live in your car’s cup holder. 

If you have (or would like to have) more willpower when dining out with a freebie offer, organize your ordering plan around your food budget.

Schedule Strategically

Just as you’re being judicious with your financial resources or nutritional boundaries, be just as cautious and wise when scheduling how and when you’ll take advantage of freebies.

Don’t cram a dozen freebie redemptions into one weekend! 

If you’ve never seen the Gilmore Girls episode called A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving, Lorelai and Rory end up racing to four different Thanksgiving celebrations in one day. At Emily and Richard’s, there a get-dressed-up traditional meal. At Lane’s house, Mrs. Kim’s holds a strict, Korean dinner. At Sookie and Jackson’s, there’s a farm-to-table feast complete with Jackson’s wild and turkey-frying family, and at Luke’s diner, they settle in for a real family meal.

They found it fun (like freebies), but stressful (also like freebies).

 

If you’re sprinting through the mall like you’re on Supermarket Sweep, maybe it’s time to rethink your freebie game plan.

Spreading redemptions out will have three benefits.

First, you’ll have less stress. You’ll be fitting freebies into a carefully considered calendar instead of feeling like you’re battling Black Friday crowds.

Second, you’ll be less likely to bump up against the margins of your willpower (re: your financial and caloric budgets).

Third, the special delight of your birthday will last longer. Won’t it be more fun to celebrate each day of your birthday month (or the weeks following your actual birthday) if there’s a little treat each day?

Turn Down the Guilt

If you were raised with few resources, you may feel guilty or uncomfortable not taking reaping the financial benefits of free things. But, again, some free things have strings attached.

Your resources (of money, physical and mental health, and time) affiliated with the freebies have value, as does your sanity and chance to have a less chaotic schedule. And nobody gets to say how you spend your resources except you. 

It’s alright to enjoy your freebies. It’s okay to let some offers go. It’s your (birthday) party, and you can cry if you want to, but you can also get $20 off a pretty bra at Lane Bryant or eat a free slice of cake if you want to, too!

Your birthday’s about you, not about proving you’re the reigning champ of Birthday Freebie Bingo! 

FINAL BIRTHDAY FREEBIE THOUGHTS

There’s a yummy Italian restaurant, Provino’s, with six locations in Georgia and one here in Chattanooga. They’re known for their buttery garlic knots and free birthday dinners:

We have made quite a name for ourselves when it comes time for a birthday celebration. Come in on your birthday and get the Spaghetti Classica with marinara or meat sauce or if you choose take $14.50 off any menu choice, this includes our famous salad, garlic rolls and a birthday dessert. (Please show I.D.)

This is why there’s always a massive crowd in Provino’s lobby waiting to get in. There are only 365 days in year, which means there’s a good chance on any given day, that it’s a lot of people’s birthdays, and as previously noted, when you are getting a free meal, you’re pretty likely to want to take people with you. 

On the plus side, free food and festivity! (Also on the plus side, those garlicky, buttery knots.) On the downside, the crowds mean there may be a long wait. Only you know which matters more to you.

Don’t let a handful of free offers turn your birthday into a part-time job. The real gift is your time, so spend it wisely — and maybe on cake. Or cheese. Or cheesecake.

How to Organize Your Response to the 2024 National Public Data Breach

Posted on: August 26th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 20 Comments

Hack! Breach! Data theft!

You see a news story about yet another company getting hacked, or you receive a letter from some service provider telling you that their servers were “breached.” Sometimes the letter offers advice, or perhaps a year of free credit monitoring.

Organizing your records, passwords, financial resources, and entire identity to protect against identity theft is exhausting. It would be understandable if you tend to tune out any news about such hacks and breaches.

Over the past week or so, however, you might have heard about a particularly nasty breach, leaving bad guys with access to millions of Social Security numbers. That probably made you sit up and take notice…and get queasy.

THE UNPRECEDENTED BREACH OF SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AND MORE

At the outset, I should note that contrary to popular perception — the Social Security Administration was not hacked. The federal government wasn’t breached.

Who Got Hacked and When?

A Florida-based data brokerage company, National Public Data (NPD), got hacked. You may wonder how NPD got so much personal data in the first place. It, like many companies of its kind, scrapes data from wherever they can, including federal and state public records databases like voter registries, DMV records, professional license filings, birth/marriage/death records, criminal and civil course records, and non-public databases.

So, private information, by way of how the modern world works, gets stored somewhere over which we have no control, and then scraped, gobbled up by companies like NPD. They then turn around and sell our private data to anyone willing to pay — from employee background-check sites to private investigators (not cool, Sam Spade!) to data resellers. 

According to NPD, the crime took place in December 2023; it just took a while to become known (and then a lot longer for NPD to own up to it). It’s not clear who actually stole the data.

What is clear is that the breach became known in on April 7, 2024, when a hacker group identified as USDoD posted on the dark web, offering an estimated 2.9 billion individual rows of data records for $3,5000,000. Jeez Louise!

At this point, various “bad actors” (by which I don’t mean David Hasselhoff or Pauly Shore) began posting on the dark web and leaking about the availability of the purloined data. 

The breach was reported by the Daily Dark Web in a piece entitled NationalPublicData.com Hack Exposes a Nation’s Data:

The leaked data, which spans from the years 2019 to 2024, is of unprecedented magnitude, comprising 2.9 billion rows. The sheer volume of information involved is monumental, with the compressed data reaching 200GB to a staggering 4TB when uncompressed. The breached database includes comprehensive citizen information, firstname, lastname, middlename, name_suff, address,city, county name, phone 1,aka1 fullname, ssn and more. Such a massive breach raises serious concerns regarding data privacy, security, and the potential for widespread misuse or exploitation.

However, Daily Dark Web also noted that there was “a strong possibility that the assertion may be exaggerated and that the data could have been scraped from publicly available sources. Additional scrutiny and analysis are required to validate or refute these allegations.” 

You’d expect that the mainstream media might attack this story like a dog with a bone, but few outlets took any notice. Instead, they focused on all the usual wars, natural disasters, sports, bird flu, Taylor Swift, and Congress trying to shut down TikTok. 

Then, on July 21, 2024, someone leaked exactly what was stolen. Members of the cybercrime community Breachforums released in excess of 4 terabytes of data they claimed had been stolen (though not by them) from NPD.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com 

What Did the Hackers Get?

The breach contained massive database holdings at the nationalpublicdata.com domain, stealing Social Security records, phone numbers, physical address histories, and some email addresses of many millions of Americans. Information datasets from Canada and the United Kingdom were also included.

Per Troy Hunt, a regional director of Microsoft and founder of Have I Been Pwned (a site that helps people determine whether their email address has been included in data breaches), there were also 70 million rows from a database of U.S. criminal records. 

Techcrunch referred to the data stolen as “partly legitimate — if imperfect.” 

Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security further wrote that Atlas Data Privacy Corp. researchers found that there were 272 million unique Social Security Numbers in the entire records set, and that most of the records had a name, Social Security Number, and home address; approximately 26% of those records also included a phone number.

Apparently Atlas verified a subset of 5,000 addresses and phone numbers, and found that those records were, with “very few exceptions” for people born before January 1, 2002. So, maybe your college student is safe. But the rest of us? Oy.

Atlas also found that the average age of consumers in the records was 70 — with approximately two million records related to people who would be at least 120 years old at this point, so at least some of have already shuffled off this mortal coil, taking their credit lines with them.

This still leaves a lot of questions. Which data got out? Was it accurate or out of date? Which data was for deceased persons and which for real, live peeps? And what good data is paired with bad data? 

If you’re feeling cyberwonky, read Troy Hunt’s Inside the “3 Billion People” National Public Data Breach. Hunt states that, “[t]here were no email addresses in the Social Security number files.” So, figuring out how bad it all is may take a while, because it’s hard to know what info is current and properly matched to your public identity. 

Where Do Things Stand Now?

Mainstream media finally took notice on August 1, 2024, when California resident Christopher Hoffman filed a class action suit. Even then, NPD didn’t respond publicly until Friday, August 16, 2024, more than two weeks later, four months after the breach was originally reported, and more than eight months after the initial crime occurred!

And when NPD finally did post a milquetoast-y comment, it merely said that the breach involved a “third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.” Well, duh.

That’s not even all! According to two Bleeping Computer pieces, National Public Data Confirms Breach Exposing Social Security Numbers, and Hackers Leak 2.7 Billion Data Records with Social Security Numbers, on August 6, 2024, “another threat actor known as Fenice shared for free the most comprehensive variant of the database with 2.7 billion records, with multiple records referring to a single person” and further, the “threat actor known as “Fenice” leaked the most complete version of the stolen National Public Data data for free on the Breached hacking forum.”

Meanwhile, in finger-pointing worthy of the Spider-Man memes, this Fenice claimed that the data breach was actually conducted by a different threat actor named “SXUL” rather than USDoD. (What, nobody’s named Mike anymore?)

(I created this from a meme generator. Apologies for offended artistic tastes.)

So, our data was stolen, priced for sale for $3.5 million, and then offered up for free to hackers, but nobody told us regular folk until the lawyers wanted attention for a class action suit?

If you feel like you need an aspirin, you’re not alone. Nothing about this feels particularly organized. Or fair.

This class action suit is a big deal, because, as the plaintiff’s law firm explained in a press release, Hoffman was not a customer of NPD. None of us were.

Thus, unlike when we get those letters from our doctor’s office or credit card companies, we never voluntarily gave our personal information to NPD in the first place, so most Americans (and Canadians, and citizens of the UK) won’t even know if they’ve been affected by the breach until or unless something along a continuum from hinky to financially catastrophic happens. 

As a result, it’s essential to take action and organize your resources against potential fallout.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR INFORMATION WAS HACKED

The cybersecurity firm Pentester accessed the files included in the breach and created a free database/breach check of the stolen information — but with Social Security numbers redacted, birthdates partially redacted, and phone numbers and street addresses in the clear.

I know it doesn’t look very impressive, but experts and journalists, including at Time Magazine, have recommended using it.

Enter your first name, last name, state, and birth year. It will search billions of leaked records and note whether your information was included in the breach. 

If your data isn’t found, you’ll get an error message instead of a list of records. Yay! Except that’s the starting point, not the finish line. Boo!

  • Check every state you’ve lived in. Ever.
  • Check your maiden name, or any other name by which you’ve been known, legally or otherwise.
  • Check for your significant other, your parents, your kids, and pretty much everyone you care about. (I mean, you could also search for your horrible boss, the kid who stuffed you in a locker in seventh grade, and your ex-mother-in-law, just to enjoy a little schadenfreude. I won’t tell.)

However, will only tell you is whether your information is out there, somewhere, naked. Your next step is protect that data from molestation as best you can.

PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST YOUR DATA BEING USED AGAINST YOU

Monitor your financial life

You should already be regularly checking your bank accounts and credit card statements for anomalies. Either log in to one at a time or use a financial dashboard like Empower, Rocket Money, or one of the other popular alternatives to the late, lamented Mint.

Next, monitor your credit reports.

Longtime Paper Doll readers know that I always advise using AnnualCreditReport.com, which, by law, guarantees a free credit report from each of the three credit reporting bureaus per year. Better yet, after the onset of the COVID pandemic and the related financial chaos that ensued, Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union temporarily offered free weekly credit reports.

The bureaus extended those offers twice over the years, and as of last October, the Federal Trade Commission reported that AnnualCreditReport.com will now permanently make available weekly credit reports at no charge so that consumers can dispute errors, be watchful for any fraudulent account openings or changes, and report identity crimes at IdentityTheft.gov.

While you’re pulling your own credit report, pull them for your children, too. Even the existence of a credit report for a child who has never applied for credit is a big, honking sign that something fraudulent may have occurred.

Place a fraud alert on your credit file

This requires that any creditors contact you before making changes to any of the accounts you already have or before opening any new accounts in your name. You needn’t contact all three credit bureaus; rather, once you request a fraud alert with one bureau (say Equifax), the other two (Experian and Trans-Union) will be notified.

Per a law passed in 2018, fraud alerts stay in place for a full year (unless you rescind it earlier), and victims of identity theft and related crimes can secure an extended fraud alert for seven years. Previously, fraud alerts lasted only 90 days.

Also, the law requires that each of the credit reporting bureau must automatically send you a free credit report after you request a fraud alert. Scrutinize them carefully. 

To request a fraud alert, contact one of the three credit bureaus’ fraud alert divisions:

  • Equifax — or call 1-800-525-6285
  • Experian — or call 1-888-397-3742
  • TransUnion — or call 1-800-680-7289  (Note: an extended TransUnion fraud alert must be requested by mail.)

But before you choose this path, there’s a better option.

Freeze your credit file

A credit freeze is different from a fraud alert. While the fraud alert says that creditors have to contact you before changing or opening accounts, a freeze says, “Nope. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.” A freeze prevents any new loans or credit from being taken out in your name — even by you!

A credit freeze is different from a fraud alert. A fraud alert requires creditors contact you before changing/opening accounts; a freeze says, *Nope. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.* A freeze prevents any new loans/credit from… Share on X

The freeze stays in place until or unless you revoke it. So, if you need to buy a new car, seek a student loan or mortgage, or apply for a credit card, you can temporarily remove the freeze. After you secure funding, you can put the freeze back on.

Ice Photo by Enrique Zafra at Pexels.com

  • Contact each of the three credit bureaus.

Unlike with the fraud alert, where you only have to contact one of the credit bureaus, you’ll need to contact all three at the following freeze division links or numbers:

You must create an account with login credentials before you can proceed to request a freeze.

  • Keep your PINs in a safe place.

When you place a freeze on your credit, you’ll get PIN. You’ll need those PINs to defrost — I mean, unfreeze — your credit later. (Note: I helped a less tech-savvy client in her 80s accomplish this on Friday, and we learned that TransUnion no longer requires a PIN; your TransUnion login will suffice.)

Where you safeguard your PIN depends on the standard methods that you already use; you don’t want to be dependent upon your memory of an out-of-character decision. 

  • Write PINs down and put them in your fireproof safe or safety deposit box.
  • Enter PINs in your digital password manager.
  • Put PINs in your secure password book in code.

Do NOT put them on a sticky note affixed to the front of your computer. Do NOT write them in a little notebook that you take out of your home. 

  • Protect the credit files of your loved ones and those in your care

That 2018 law guarantees that you can freeze (and unfreeze) your own credit for free. (This is different from a credit lock, which requires a subscription to a credit bureaus’ services.) In addition to setting a freeze for yourself, you can obtain a credit freeze for your children under the age of 16. (Minors aged 16 or 17 may request their own freezes.)

Photo by Julia M Cameron on Pexels.com 

Because minors can’t apply for loans, people rarely check children’s credit history. In theory, there shouldn’t even be a credit bureau file for a child, so when young adults start out trying to get student loans or credit cards, they may be in for a shock to learn that someone has already destroyed their credit!

For more on preventing children from being the victims of identity theft, check out:

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-protect-your-child-identity-theft

Additionally, if you serve as a conservator or guardian, or if you hold someone’s Power of Attorney, you may secure a free credit freeze for them, as well.

Why else should you get a credit freeze?

Any time you are at greater risk of identity theft, whether through a massive data breach, a run-in with a bad roommate, a breakup with a creep, or you’ve had your wallet stolen or your home burgled, a credit freeze can give you peace of mind that nobody will be able to access credit in your name.

Similarly, if elderly relatives develop dementia or anything that impairs their cognitive capacity, they can become prey to predatory lenders and charlatans selling everything from scammy auto repair warranties to non-existent services. A credit freeze prevents scams from moving past the spam stage.

Military Fraud Alerts

Members of all United States military branches have an additional resource that predates the 2018 law. They can set active duty alerts, allowing them to place a fraud alert for one year, renewable for the entirety of their deployment.

For Equifax, use the online form for an Active Duty Alert or call 800-525-6285. Meanwhile Experian has an online form but no phone number, and TransUnion has a phone number (800-680-7289) but no online form.

As a bonus, securing an active duty alert prompts the credit reporting agencies to remove a service member from the marketing lists for sneaky pre-screened credit card offers. (Service members can request to be added back, but who wants that junk mail?) 

DON’T GET SCAMMED

Even partial information allows scammers to contact you, pretending they’re preventing scams. A caller might fake being from your bank or credit card, alerting you to a hacking risk. They may request you log into one of your accounts and change passwords (to something they provide) for “testing” purposes that might sound reasonable if you’ve been interrupted while chasing a toddler or running a meeting.

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Be vigilant. If contacted by phone, text, or email, don’t respond, even (or especially) if the contact appears to already have some of your data. They’re using what they DO have to get you to reveal what they DON’T have — more of your private information. Call your financial institution directly.

The Social Security Administration won’t call you. They won’t email. They won’t text you. (Government sites may email or text two-factor authentication codes when you log into a federal site, like ssa.gov, but that’s initiated by you.)

My March post, Slam the Scam! Organize to Protect Against Scams, focused mainly on scams targeting seniors, but will help you protect yourself and loved ones from most common scams, and provides resources to help you learn more.

The Hill‘s August 15, 2024 piece, Was your data leaked in massive breach?: How to Know, and What to Do Now, has a good point about the likelihood of being at risk:

“If you’re a high-value individual that maybe has a high net worth or works at a company that they can extort you, you might actually be a real target,” Kyle Hanslovan, CEO of cybersecurity firm Huntress, previously told Nexstar. “For the masses though, the everyday common person, you’re more of a target of opportunity.”

Most people shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about what may happen if their information ends up in the wrong hands. Instead, Hanslovan recommends keeping an eye on your important accounts and making sure you’re prepared to act in case something does go wrong.

“It stinks for privacy, but it kind of normalizes just what’s happening,” Hanslovan said. “It doesn’t make it right, and it definitely doesn’t wave, you know, a company’s true fiduciary responsibilities to protect your data.”

Someone should tell NPD that.

Other Ways to Keep Bad Guys From Using Your Data to Hack You

  • Make your passwords long and complex. Using at least 16 characters, with a mix of capitals, lowercase, numbers, and special symbols, will make it hard to hack you. 

Image Source @2024 Hive Systems

  • Use a password manager for all your longer, more complex passwords. 
  • Turn on two-factor or multifactor authentication for as many of your online accounts as allow it. (That’s like when you get a text or email with a code to enter before your login is authenticated.) Alternatively, you can use an authenticator app.
  • Set up account alerts for your bank, investment, and credit card accounts, particularly to flag online or in-person purchases or ATM transactions outside of the US. 
  • Keep security software updated on your computer and phone.
  • Don’t check financial accounts on insecure Wi-Fi networks; wait until you’re home, on secured WI-Fi network.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR DATA IS USED FRAUDULENTLY

ONE LAST WEIRD THING

You may have noticed something odd about the class action suit. You’d expect National Public Data’s parent company to have a tech-leaning name, like InfoDynamics or Identidata.

Nope. The parent company is Jerico Pictures Inc., a Florida-based film studio owned by Salvatore (Sal) Verini, Jr., a retired deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s office who fashions himself as an actor, producer, and writer.

Verini is also listed as the owner of companies called Trinity Entertainment Inc., National Criminal Data LLC, Shadowglade LLC (which sounds like a housing development in a horror movie produced by a company with a name like Jerico Pictures), and Twisted History LLC, which sounds like a joke. 

Meanwhile, victims of data hacking won’t be doing a lot of laughing.

REFERENCES

As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I often help clients protect their identities and financial information. However, I am not a cybercrime specialist, nor do I play one on television. To research the specifics of this breach, in addition to the many government and tech-oriented links in the above post, I used a clarifying mainstream sources, including:

Keep your eyes open and your personal information close to the vest.

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