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Should I purchase identity theft insurance?

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Speaker: Should I purchase identity theft insurance?

Linda Sherry: Identity theft insurance is one of those products, it's very really a very personal choice, but I can tell you few things about it that are important.

For instance, what is -- it never covers losses from identity theft; it covers the cost of repairing your good name and that can be significant in some cases; that could be attorney's fees, that could be loss of work when you have to take off days to repair your credit. So in that instance it might well serve you well.

I would say that look at a number of such polices and compare them very carefully because some of them have exclusions and limitations that actually won't help you much when you get to the point of needing to take advantage of this product and the other thing is go to your homeowner's insurance or call up your brokers that sells you your homeowner's insurance and make sure that this is an already, automatically covered. Many homeowner's policies do have a protection against ID theft.

Expert: Linda Sherry

Director, National Priorities

http://www.consumer-action.org

Email: editor@consumer-action.org

Linda Sherry, Consumer Action’s director of national priorities and one of the organization’s chief spokespersons, joined the San Francisco-based national consumer education and advocacy group in 1994 from a background as a weekly newspaper reporter.Consumer Action (www.consumer-action.org), founded in 1971, has a national reputation for free multilingual consumer education on personal finance More »