I have a confession to make. All the posts you’ve seen posted on The Modern Gal in the past three days I prewrote on Thursday so that I could have a bit of a mini-vacation from blogging. So today, I just plain forgot to blog over my lunchtime. I’m a bad blog proprietor.
So, to kick start this week, here’s a great tip from Real Simple on how to keep track of the oodles of passwords you need to operate on the internetz. I wish I’d seen this sooner before I managed to lock myself out of the online access to my Target Card account trying to remember what password combination I’d given it.
I have five levels of passwords:
1. My bank account
2. Websites that keep my credit card and/or bank account info
3. Websites that keep my personal info (like my blog)
4. I can’t remember what 4 was, I never use it…
5. everything else that keeps no personal info.
Each level has a separate password and login, and every year at New Year’s I change all the passwords, usually keeping them to a theme. (Last year it was “names from summer camp”) I write down the login on one piece of paper, and the passwords on another, and keep those papers in separate places in my house.
And yes, half the time I forget to write stuff down, and I always forget which sites I need to change at New Year’s. But for the most part it works.
That’s a really good idea. The thing that throws me is when different sites require something very specific as part of your username or password like a special character. That’s what I always forget.
I alternate through a list of my favorite ski slopes for my work passwords.