Best of the Week, Winners and Milestones

Just Picked and Notified our third winner in the RSS Sign-up Contest. Hope to give a link and a quote during the mid-day update. Remember all you have to do is sign-up for the RSS feed HERE or on the main page, verify the email...and that's it! You are entered. If you are already on the list you are entered in to next weeks final drawing as well!

Great week for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Money as we hit new milestones, increased readership and had great traffic. It was a great week for some of my favorite blogs as well. so without any further ado...

The Best Of the Web for the Week:

• Brightside of Debt - This one is me trying to rally folk to go there and comment on the linked post! - Brightside is considering stopping her blogg as her Hubby found out about itand she's feeling guilty. I know so many of my readers read her blog. Go to this post and let her know how great her blog is and how you want her to stay!!!
• Iowa Hippie Chick -This is about her Financial Epiphany, but really it is about much more. One of the best written, most touching posts I have read in a long time. She is a favorite of mine for a reason!
• Finwikian - This new Personal Finance Wiki (pfWiki) was pulled together by Mrs Micah and could become a great repository for some great collected Finance knowledge!
• Hustler Money Blog - More then one single post Hustler does an amazing job compiling all of the current Credit card deals. I personally would rather chop them up, but if you are gonna have one, get the best deal!
• Plonkee - A great post and mini-Carnival that goes into great depth and explanation of Dave Ramsey's Baby' Steps. Great stuff...as usual!

My Most Read Post of the Week:

• LifeLock = Life Crock? - A look at the successful program. Is is really a good Value? Detective X takes a look! :)

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Money Milestones:

• 369 Visitors in one Day! - Biggest day ever by far (Feb 28th), due to msn MoneyBlog story
• Over 11,500 Page Views
• Over 4700 Total Visitors
• Over 50 Subscribers!
• Achieved PageRank with Google! PR2...bigger and better to come!

Thanks to all for being great supporters! I hope to be worthy!

LifeLock = Life Crock?

I was reading some of my favorite blogs and I came across a post about how the blogger had just signed up for LifeLock and they were very happy to have their credit protected for $198/year for the family. Now, I applaud taking extra measures to protect yourself, and I had heard the radio ads so I was interested in what this was all about.

But after I read the post, and then checked out their website I was concerned.

Here is there 5 point plan from their website:

Here is what LifeLock Offers You

• Proactive Identity Theft Protection
• Reduce Junk Mail
• Reduce Credit Card Offers
• $1 Million Service Guarantee
• Only $10 per Month

The only problem with that is that is a free service that the credit bureaus offer. People can easily place a fraud alert on their own account, for free, by calling Experian at 1-888-397-3742. A Fraud Alert blocks your name being rented to Credit Card Companies which reduce the junk mail, the proactive protection is LifeLock working with Experian to set the free lock.

So what you get, is the $1 million insurance policy. $198 for $1MM in protection isn't crazy, but like a bad potato the deeper I peeled the more rotten this looked to me...

It must work the CEO gives out his Social Security Number!

Well sort of, this protects you from someone opening a regular credit card at a bank as they all use the big clearing houses like Experian. Actually after the ads hit CEO Todd Davis WAS hit with identity theft as this Phoenix New Times piece explains further. He found out when a collection agency contacted him about a $500 loan he took out and didn't pay on, surprising him as he never took out the loan!

Other disturbing things came up as well. Apparently the Founder of LifeLock Robert J Maynard's story of starting LifeLock didn't check out either. He was arrested because of HIS own gambling debts not due to identity theft, in fact his own father accused Mr. Maynard of committing Identity theft...on him!

After that story hit in May, Mr Maynard resigned from LifeLock and is no longer involved in the company.

So how did the Identity Theft work out for the current CEO Todd Davis? It did get resolved...the company hired an outside firm to fix it!

Too many warning bells for me. Run Forrest!

Detective Racer X...out :)