Credit Identity Theft | My Mother Tells Us About Identity Theft Insurance

My Mother Tells Us About Identity Theft Insurance

My mom and dad are the most responsible, dependable people I know.

My dad worked in one job – as a teacher – for over 30 years. My mom was a teacher for over 33 years.

They lived for 30 years in the same Los Angeles house that they bought back in the early 1970’s for about $30,000 or so. They sold that house a short time ago for over $700,000 and moved to Omaha, where they had a much nicer but much less expensive house built for them to live in.

Grandkids, you see.

From the time I was old enough to understand the fundamental concepts underlying risk and return (which according to my dad still hasn’t really happened), my parents have been drilling into me the importance of insurance.

Their house was completely covered for fire loss, wind damage, earthquake damage, theft – anything you can think of. Their cars were always fully insured. They maintained health insurance on each other as well as themselves – and each covered the whole family with their health insurance so that their out of pocket expenses for medical bills were very, very small.

Throughout their lives, my parents have been sensible, dependable people who didn’t ever want to worry about losing their house, their cars – their general way of life – to some chance moment of fate.

For the most part, I thought they were absolutely boring. And they were. Oh, I still listened to their advice for the most part, because it was the same advice I’d heard from countless other sources of wisdom who get paid big bucks to go on television and tell me the same things my parents would tell me.

I bought full coverage car insurance and kept my deductible reasonable. I bought renters insurance for less than it cost me to eat out once a week. I picked up health insurance from the college. Once Sarah and I were married, I bought enough life insurance to cover several years worth of her living expenses.

So it’s not that I didn’t know to buy insurance, and it’s not that I didn’t know that insurance existed for identity theft. I’d heard the Lifelock commercials on radio and seen the television ads, and I thought I knew what it was about – and it wasn’t about me.

I think that, at the time my mom offered to buy me a Lifelock subscription for a year, my opinion on the matter was that credit identity theft was something that happened to careless people and that credit card companies and the credit bureaus have it in their best interest to work with their customers.

I was wrong on both counts, as I’ll tell you about in a later entry.

My mom and I had a conversation about Lifelock about halfway through the year Sarah and I moved into our newer apartment. I think I had seen the information packet that Lifelock sends out to new customers and she saw me looking at it. As I rolled my eyes, my mom told me that she and dad had just signed up for Lifelock because they’d known a few of their friends who had gone through a instance or two of attempted identity theft and that those friends had good experience with the identity theft insurance that Lifelock gives them.

I think she caught my general attitude of “Whatever” because I remember she told me, “You know how your dad and I feel about insurance.”

Yes, mom. I do. I know, I know, I know.

My mother, being a truly excellent mother who is patient with her wayward son, asked if I would like her to buy me a subscription to Lifelock. I, being a wayward son who doesn’t deserve his mother, told her that I didn’t buy into the hype and that it’d be a waste of 10 bucks a month.

My mom responded to that the way she always responds when I don’t do what she wants me to do:

It’s your life and your choice.

I kick myself today for not taking her up on the offer when she offered it the first time. After all, Lifelock protects you with that million-dollar guarantee the moment you sign up, before you even receive the paperwork, even. As soon as you give them your credit card information, you’re covered and essentially have nothing to worry about when it comes to identity theft.

So yeah, I should have let her spring for a subscription. Mom was right.

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