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Electronic financial documents--are they safe?
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: San Francisco
Status:
Offline
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My bank keeps telling me to sign up for electronic document delivery. I could get my statements, my investment records, my insurance papers. All sorts of stuff. I have a few questions about this.
First, is this safe? From a privacy standpoint? From a financial catastrophe concern (if someone did steal my ID and I needed proof to recover, fire, or something)?
Second, how should this be implemented?
Download all documents in PDF format and store them in a folder that is encrypted? What's the best way to encrypt stuff? Backup this folder to an external hard drive every day, burn to CD every week. What about storing a copy on your iDisk? Is that a secure location from a privacy perspective?
How often should you actually print stuff out?
Maybe I am overanalyzing this, but it seems like something that should be considered carefully. Does anyone have any experience with this?
kman
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Boston, MA
Status:
Offline
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I do online banking which is great. I still get paper though. Of course I do backups. 
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"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." Winston Churchill
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Central New York
Status:
Offline
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I've been doing online banking and bill paying for three years. It takes 1/10th the time, saves about $10 a month in postage, and all my records are right at my fingertips. Everything including bank statements, electronic bill payments and credit card statements are downloaded to Quicken. I pay $6.95 a month for this service and it is worth every penny.
Start small, find the right institutions, services and software, and get comfortable with it. Piece of cake. I'll be paying my Cingular bill in a few minutes. Will take me less than a minute.
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macforray
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: San Francisco
Status:
Offline
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I already pay my bills and download the auto-updates to quicken, but I still get the paper statements in the mail. I'm just wondering if I should stop getting them and start receiving them electronically. And if I do then I obviously wouldn't have paper copies filed away in case something happens. Do you print them out periodically? Just back them up? Do you encrypt your financial data?
kman
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status:
Offline
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Electronic financial handling should be safe in most cases. Use strong passwords and stay away from phishing lures, and it should be safer than paper based documents that can be stolen from your mailbox or pilfered through by those with access to your home. The fewer sensitive documents I have coming by mail, the better I feel from a convenience and security standpoint.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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