Home Security, Monitoring Options to Protect Your Family

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It takes a tremendous amount of effort to acquire the skill of earning a good to great livelihood. You may have to spend years in school to earn a degree and years climbing up a career ladder. Yet, this earning ability has to be balanced with another skill, which is the ability to protect yourself financially.

There is no shortage of stories throughout history of people who have acquired modest to great wealth only to lose it all. It’s just plain common sense to assert that earning ability has to be balanced with the ability to protect your money. Unless you get good at balancing this delicate equation, you will either lose your money or fail to have enough to invest for greater wealth.

With that in mind, let’s look at five simple strategies ways to protect your wealth from a variety of losses.

1. Protect yourself against theft.

There are many ways you can lose your money due to carelessness. Unfortunately, not everyone is like you. Not everyone believes in honesty, integrity, and working hard for their money. Some people like the easy route of simply taking what you have if you’re not vigilant about protecting it. Protect your house from burglary by installing ADT security, which has earned the reputation of providing the best electronic security in the US and Canada. Protect your cash, valuables, records, and documents in a bank vault from theft, fire, flood, and natural disasters. And protect your identity when using credit cards.

2. Protect yourself from financial scams.

Perhaps the biggest source of financial losses have been scams. While many are obvious because they sound too good to be true, especially the get-rich-scams which promise huge rewards for modest investments, there are many clever scams that fool a large proportion of people. Con artists carefully study ways to unobtrusively build trust and win people over, and they delight in the ingenuity of their schemes.

In an article warning people about top money scams in 2016, Motley Fool identified five scams that hoodwinked a large number of people:

Charity and home improvement impersonators.
Email and phishing scams.
Telephone scams: Election donations, jury duty and healthcare.
Computer and Internet scams.
Credit card scams: Microchip and EMV cards.

The reasons these scams worked so well is because they appeared highly plausible. For instance, the charity scams were executed by women in white dresses and nursing caps who “solicited motorists for money by walking around at stoplights holding out tin cans that had a label on them like ‘Help Fight Drugs.’” And the jury duty scams appeared to be from court officials calling on people who had skipped jury duty.

3. Protect your money by managing it better.

Mismanagement of money can range from not keeping your checkbook balanced to paying for things that you could have got cheaper if you had shopped elsewhere. The way to manage your money better is to create a budget and track your spending, combine your finances if you’re married, create a calendar for your bills, build a fund for emergencies, and use cash more often than credit cards.

4. Protect your assets by getting insurance.

While buying insurance is often mandatory, it’s possible to make bad decisions about the quality of insurance that you buy. In an effort to save on premiums, it’s tempting to get far too little coverage. Unfortunately, if you ever need to make a claim, you’ll find that you’ve lost a lot more money than if you had just paid the higher premiums and got comprehensive coverage. While frugality is often a virtue, it’s not always a reliable strategy for protecting your wealth.

5. Protect your finances by avoiding overconsumption

We live in a world of constant temptation. It’s easy to consume more than you need to meet your needs or to get some joy from life. By budgeting your money, only allowing yourself a set amount for luxury spending, and by shopping around for everything from electricity rates (if you live in an area with energy deregulation) to everyday consumer goods, you can save a huge amount of money that could be invested to create even more wealth.