Personal finance tasks can sometimes (often?) be tediously boring for most of us. Even as someone who’s written extensively on personal finance-related activities for over a decade, I admit that creating account logins with government agencies may not top my list of enjoyable ways to spend my free time on a Saturday afternoon.
As with most personal finance inputs, the long-term returns are often much greater than any time spent upfront. Spending five minutes now creating five government accounts highlighted in this article could prevent identity theft and save hours of headache in the future, not to mention providing invaluable insights, benefits and features that you will use repeatedly – in other words: make time to eat your broccoli! Let’s do this together now.
Where to Create an Account on USPS Informed Delivery: USPS Informed Delivery website
USPS Informed Delivery, launched by the U.S. Postal Service in 2017 (it’s still being phased in), is a free service that provides online images of letters addressed directly to you along with tracking information for packages that have entered their distribution chain and should reach your mailbox or PO Box shortly. You can even see when an item was delivered. How is this information beneficial? I can think of at least several applications:
Your tracking capabilities allow you to stay up-to-date on what has arrived or is on its way, especially helpful if someone needs to pick up items off your porch or empty out your mailbox while you’re out of town.
Your tracking app allows you to stay up-to-date on when mail will reach you or be sent, which saves a lot of time on customer service calls at various institutions.
Assure yourself that everything you are expecting to reach your mailbox actually does so and take appropriate measures (e.g. monitoring mailbox or reaching out to sender).
Prevention of identity theft offers many advantages. Unfortunately, Informed Delivery technology that offers such valuable protection also has the power to exacerbate mail identity theft if an identity thief beats you to setting up an Informed Delivery account and has advance knowledge of what will arrive (e.g. bills that could contain sensitive personal data). Enrolling requires providing only basic pieces of information, including cities and addresses of prior residence and sale price of home – which could easily be found via public databases, social media and elsewhere. With reported cases of this happening before anyone else does it would be wise to get there early to claim ownership so as to benefit from all that this service offers.
I check my Informed Delivery email updates daily and hope that you do too. It is truly amazing technology!
+ There are no comments
Add yours