When is it safe to give out my Social Security number?
When asked when it is safe to give out your social security number, the answer is never. Unfortunately, you have to give it out at many different points in your life, so when you give it out, I would resist as much as possible. But then in the end, know that your responsibilities are essentially to check your credit report to see if there are any accounts opened up in your name without your knowledge. By checking your credit report you can respond to those companies that issue credit under your name and cancel those accounts before it becomes a major issue for you. Unfortunately, checking your credit report is something that most people don't do all that often. Usually it's someone else who checks those reports, like a bank or automobile dealership, and when they check your credit, usually they either determine if you have good credit or bad credit, and at that time you are either granted credit or denied credit. So what I recommend people do, is to check your credit at least every three to six months, to make sure that there aren't any accounts opened up in your name without your knowledge. The best protection that you and I have available to us today, really is to get involved in credit monitoring services. credit monitoring services are monthly fees that you pay, where you can keep a full account of the information on your credit report. For example, if someone was trying to open an account under my name today, via my credit report, if they were to check my credit, the credit monitoring service would inform me that in fact there is someone checking my credit and then I can shut that account down before it becomes a problem.
