Should I purchase identity theft insurance?

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Linda Sherry
Director, National Priorities, Consumer Action
http://www.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 issues.

Sherry, who moved to Washington, DC, in August 2004 to establish an office for Consumer Action, is responsible for the organization’s national advocacy work and for the research and writing of Consumer Action’s free educational publications and web site content. Her recent projects for Consumer Action include publications on home buying, credit card terms and conditions, bankruptcy, ID theft, Internet privacy, cell phones and investing vs. savings. Sherry is chief surveyor and coordinator of Consumer Action’s popular pricing surveys of rates for credit cards and telephone services. She is the editor of Consumer Action’s newsletter, Consumer Action News.

Sherry has received awards for Consumer Action publications from the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators (Excellence in Consumer Education, 1996, 2000 and 2003) and U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs (1995 National Consumer Week). Sherry serves as a member of the National Consumers League Fraud Alliance steering committee.

Before joining Consumer Action, Sherry was managing editor of AsianWeek in San Francisco from 1991-1994. Previously she was a reporter at The Almanac newspapers in Menlo Park, CA; The New York Times Long Island Section and The East Hampton Star in East Hampton, NY. She was the founding editor of the Sag Harbor Herald, a weekly newspaper in Long Island, NY.

Should I purchase identity theft insurance?

In this video, Linda Sherry details the best ways to prevent identity theft and what you can do if you think your identity has been stolen.

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Transcripts

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.

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