Best practices for retirement account security?

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texasdiver
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Joined: Thu Jun 25, 2009 12:50 am
Location: Vancouver WA

Best practices for retirement account security?

Post by texasdiver »

I'm in the middle of changing all of my passwords due to the LastPass hacking debacles and moving over to a different password manager.

As an aside for those of you also looking for LastPass alternatives, my cousin who one of the heads of network security at an Ivy League university recommended 1Password or possibly Bitwarden as the best alternatives. They are currently undertaking a review of alternatives to LastPass since they are also moving away from LastPass and she says that 1Password and Bitwarden will probably be the two finalists in their review process.

In any event, as part of a general effort to ramp up my digital security it occurs to me that I should be taking a close look at the protections the large IRA and 401(k) accounts that my wife and I both have, mostly with Vanguard and Fidelity. Since that is where most of our money is hiding.

So two questions for the group here:

1. What are all the security steps that one should take to make sure their large retirement accounts are as locked down as possible. Beyond just the issue of password hygiene, I'm talking about making the money MORE difficult to extract in general. I'm 10 years away from wanting to touch most of it so there is no reason I want the money to be easy to extract. The harder the better in fact. Vanguard has all of my ordinary bank account information to make it easy for me to make DEPOSITS. However I want to make it as hard as possible to make withdrawals in the event that both my bank account and Vanguard got hacked. I've spent some time on Vanguard's web page this morning but haven't found exactly how to do this.

2. Are all major mutual fund and retirement firms basically the same in this respect? Or are there some firms that are better at security and provide better security features to prevent fraudulent withdrawals?

Note: It occurs to me that this might be a useful topic for the Wiki.
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