It’s well into Fall and a busy time for most of us as we prepare for the holidays! This month’s newsletter has a couple of fun, useful links, a couple of quick updates on exciting enhancements we recently made for clients, and an important action you should take now to protect yourself from a recent, major national hack that may have exposed you (or a family member) to identity theft.
First, here are two fun and useful links that I recently came across and wanted to share:
- Get a Green Thumb this Fall: Official site of The National Gardening
dference / Pixabay Association. I recently had questions about my Pachysandra and found this site and forum a great resource. They also have some good articles on a variety of things, like how to prepare plants for frost and other good gardening information. And, please… no angry emails if you hate if you hate pachysandra 🙂 Garden.org
- Shape up to music: Download playlists for different types of exercise (running, warm-ups, cool downs, yoga, etc.) – or choose among various genres and artists. FitnessMagazine.com/workout/music/popular-playlists
Next, some exciting enhancements:
- Blueleaf optional free manual tracking of assets: Most clients are familiar with RockCrest’s free client portal (via blueleaf). It not only gives you a comprehensive full view of your accounts, it is also powers the Sunday account summary that I email to you each week. As you probably know, you can also add other accounts that you want to track, but are “outside” of the assets we manage on your behalf (for example: your 401(k), savings, checking, CDs, etc.) and even debt (such as mortgages, credit cards, etc). Adding these types of accounts gives you the ability to truly get a clearer financial picture of your life. We can now manually add “non-account” assets, like the value of your home, vacation property, investment properties or other assets the system was unable track efficiently before! So, now you can get an even more complete picture of your Net Worth, at a glance! Please contact me if you would like to add or discuss how we can help you track assets that are not currently reflected for you in blueleaf.
- NEW secure Client Vault: Often, clients ask me to review a “privacy sensitive”
freeGraphicToday / Pixabay document (eg. Will, Power of Attorney, outside account, etc.) or request that I send one to them (eg. account statement, invoice, tax document, etc.). Although I send such emails and attachments in an encrypted, secure manner… I am always concerned when clients send documents to me without proper encryption. So, RockCrest has invested in a secure Client Vault, that allows us to share documents back and forth through a secure, encrypted site (no emailing required!). Each client now has their own, unique login and password. This will allow clients to share or store documents with RockCrest, and vice versa, in an even more secure, fast and safe way!
Last… as most of you know by now, Equifax, one of the major credit monitoring bureaus was hacked and announced the incident early September:
- Here’s a link one of the articles I mentioned on facebook and LinkedIn when the news broke: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/massive-equifax-data-breach-could-impact-half-u-s-population-n799686
- If you haven’t already, you should go to https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com to see if you were affected, as well as, if you get their free credit monitoring service. You should also strongly consider activating a credit freeze/credit lock at Equifax and the other two major credit bureaus. I believe that doing so is one of the most proactive ways to protect yourself from identity theft. If you don’t know what it is or how to do it, please feel free to reach out and I can help explain.
Have a great Thanksgiving and safe holiday season!
Regards,
Steve Boorstein