Daily Money Tip: Protect Your Personal Information

Today’s Daily Money tip is about protecting your personal information when signing up for freebies and coupons. You have probably noticed that mail-in offers and even printable coupons sometimes require you to provide certain information about yourself. Here are some tips to help you protect your information when signing up for these offers:

1) Create a separate email account that you can use for signing up for freebies, surveys and when you register with companies. This will help keep your own personal email account decluttered.

2) Practice common sense when signing up for free offers. Some individuals will set up “fake” freebie offer only phish your information. Personally I try to be careful only to share with you free offers from reputable companies or where I can verify it is an actual company. But you also need to exercise your own best judgment.

3) Note which information is required at sign up and don’t share any additional information.

4) Don’t want to share your actual date of birth? You don’t have to. A lot of these companies as for this info to make sure only individuals 18 years and older take advantage of the offer. Don’t want to share your phone number? Not many offers will ask for this info, but you can sign up for Google Voice and create a phone number to share.

These are some of the tips I use myself to protect my information. What other tips will you add to this?  On a future post I will share tips on how to protect your information when taking advantage of freebies offered on Facebook.

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