Best advice from 2023!

Coach Natalie

Whether financial or any other type of advice, what's the best advice you received in 2023? How do you plan to carry this advice into 2024?

We can't wait to hear everyone's words of wisdom!

RobWilk

Be more aggressive in junk mail filtering. It could prevent you from giving credit card information to the wrong party.

For my main account (outlook.com/hotmail) I configured the setting where it sends ALL messages that I haven't marked as 'safe' into junkmail. Yes, about once a week now I have to mark something in junk as 'safe', and i have to keep a closer eye on junkmail, but it's become easier to group together the 'fake' e-mails by virtue of them being together in junk.

I've also this year gotten in the habit of turning on 2-factor-authentication wherever possible.

Separately, but related, I've discovered shortly after I gave a family member (another household) my password for accessing something, there was an attempt to login to my paypal account with that password later that day that was stopped by 2-factor-authentication. So, before sharing a password to a service with anyone, I recommend at least temporarily changing that password before giving it to them.

ajbopp

Best advice I received ever:

"No one ever looked smart arguing with a stupid person."

Changed my email address to a duck.com address based on the advice of a friend. One or two companies don't allow a duck.com address, so I create a rule on outlook.com that if I receive something from those domains, forward it to my duck.com address and delete the original.

UrsulaA

Best advice I received in 2023: Be someone who makes someone else look forward to tomorrow.

I also activated MFA when available, especially for financial accounts, emails, and social media accounts. Stopped two unauthorized login attempts. Added a credit freeze to the three credit reporting bureaus.

Flopbot

Listen more attentively. Speak the truth. Eat more pizza.

UrsulaA

@Flopbot - "eat more pizza" 😁

Coach Kristina

Best advice from 2023 that I received - Scammers are getting more sophisticated and are able to spoof phone numbers to make it look like they really are calling/texting from your bank or whatever government agency they're impersonating. Don't trust links or phone numbers in emails or text messages; if you're not sure whether it's real or not, look up the contact info yourself (banks put their phone number on your credit/debit card and on your statement). Never give anyone the code sent to you by text or email for multi-factor authentication. That code is used to prove to a website that you are who you say you are; if someone else is asking you for it, the odds are high that it's because they're trying to impersonate you online.

DannyB

@Coach Kristina The Information Systems dept at my last employer, a major regional medical center, would regularly and randomly send out phishing emails and texts to help employees learn what a phishing looked like. In my 5 1/2 years with this employer I only got "caught" once falling for the "scam." If you did click on the link, email link, phone number you would get a shocking "You're Busted!" notification and a bit of education on how to id phishing attempts. Trying to keep your IS protected with 5,000 plus employees logging into various and sundry databases, email, messaging is a monumental task.

Coach Kristina

@DannyB,

That's an interesting strategy to educate people. I suspect that it's far more effective (at least for those that get duped) than the regular training, which is usually read the content and take a quiz.

I almost fell for a phishing scam a few years ago, but that was because the timing of the email made it seem more legitimate. I'd just placed an order on Amazon, and less than a minute later, got an email claiming to be from Amazon and saying there was a problem with my order. Rather than click the link in the email, I logged into Amazon directly to check, and saw no problems. So I reached out to their support to find out what the issue was. They said there was no issue and to just delete the email.

DannyB

@Coach Kristina

My employer had a to forward any suspect messages to IS. When you forwarded one of the test phishing messages you would receive a "Way to Go" response for a bit of positive reinforcement.

RobWilk

Forgotten advice, but it keeps paying off: As a developer, you probably want to use Github Copilot if it supports your environment. As an independent developer, it's like i'm hiring a second programmer for $10/month. By coincidence, my IOS app made $10 in proceeds in the previous 30 days, so obviously, I don't have a big budget, but it's enough to cover copilot for a month.

DannyB

I’m trying really hard to think of any advice I received in ‘23… I’m 100% sure my kids gave me advice of some kind… just can’t remember what it was! 🤪🤣

DannyB

… OK now I remember what it was, “OK, Pops, make sure you stick close to the Spending Plan we set up for you… we don’t want you spending ALL our inheritance!” So, in 2024 I’ll certainly be sure to keep that advice in mind.