MANY OF US HAVE little more than a weak, reused password standing between our financial assets and a remote attacker—one armed with powerful tools and a database of passwords from security breaches. This is a losing battle. It’s the most likely way for weak computer security to put our finances at risk. Think this can’t happen to you? I’ll bet you have at least one password taken in a big security breach. A quick way to find out is entering your email address at Troy Hunt’s HaveIBeenPwned site. My address turns up in almost a dozen big cyberattacks. We are notoriously bad at creating strong passwords and remembering them. When you decide to create stronger, unique passwords for each site, you quickly discover that managing dozens of randomly generated, site-specific passwords by hand is a headache. Don’t fret. Password managers like LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password make short work of it. A password manager puts all your passwords in an encrypted vault, leaving you with just one password to remember. You want to make this password really strong and unforgettable. The password manager then fills in the right password for mobile apps and websites whenever you use them. What can you expect from a good manager?

• Up-to-date access to your password vault on all devices, regardless of the device’s operating system.
• Updates to your vault as you create new accounts or update existing passwords.
• A random password generator that creates really strong, unique passwords. Those passwords will meet each site’s requirements for length and allowed characters.
• A security challenge which guides you through the work of replacing existing poor passwords—those which are known to be compromised, weak or easily guessed, or which you’ve used more than once.
• Emergency access to your vault by someone you choose, as well as password sharing with, say, family members for your Amazon Prime or Netflix account.
• Two-factor authentication for extra vault security.

Some of these are only available in paid versions of the service. Despite knowing better, I procrastinated in evaluating password managers. That changed the day I tried to picture life for my spouse after I leave this vale of tears. I visualized the chores I handle: Banking, bill paying and investment management all involve online accounts. That brought my password problem into focus. A list of passwords in a binder, next to our wills, isn’t secure and it’s a pain to keep up. After experimenting with a free trial, I bought a family subscription. Moving my password vault from low-ranked to the top 1% took a couple of weekends. Each weekend, I’d spend an hour or two changing passwords, guided by the security challenge and with help from the password generator. Do this on your home PC or Mac, not an office computer. I started with high-value accounts: email, cellular carrier, and then banks and brokerages. Why email? Most web sites let you reset a password by emailing a link to the address on file. If hackers have access to your inbox, they’ll use it to access every online account. The cellular account is also important if you’ve enabled two-factor authentication that triggers text messages with secure codes. What if someone hacks into your password manager’s vault? If you pick a great vault password, the odds of this are low. But when you have all your eggs in one basket, you want to ensure that basket stays safe. That’s what led me to the YubiKey 5 series hardware keys. When you use a YubiKey with a password manager, the manager encrypts your vault twice, once with your vault password and again with a secret it gets from the YubiKey. For convenience, I’m using two models of YubiKey. I use YubiKey 5 Nano with my PC and Mac. Meanwhile, YubiKey 5 NFC stays on my keyring for use with my phone. The latter should work with an iPhone 7 or newer, as well as an Android phone with NFC (near field communication). David Powell has written software or led engineering teams for 35 years. He enjoys work, vegan fine dining, cycling and travel with his spouse. His previous article was Playing Defense. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

JUNE MARKS THREE years since my mum passed from complications of vascular dementia. It was a tough couple of years, watching her mind slowly fail and her world shrink a little more with each passing month. Anyone who has cared for a loved one in the late stages of dementia will know how difficult and disjointed even the simplest conversation becomes. The loops, the confusion, the frustration of trying to redirect someone you love from a thought they can no longer find their way out of. Mum had been comfortable, if lonely, in retirement. She was a widow for twenty-five years, and she often said with genuine surprise in her voice that she was better off financially than at any other point in her life. Not having to worry about money was a relief she never took for granted. But here's the thing: she never really thought about money either. She wasn't driven by possessions or status. She had what she needed, she was grateful, and she got on with living. Money was background noise to her, not the tune she danced to. What surprised me most came in her final year, when she was deeply confused and often entirely detached from reality. Among all the things her mind could have snagged on, the one conversation loop she returned to with unsettling clarity was money. She was convinced she had none. It made her anxious in a way that was painful to witness, a raw, childlike insecurity that seemed to rise from somewhere far deeper than conscious thought. I would reassure her, calmly and repeatedly, that her savings were healthy and there was absolutely nothing to worry about. I would joke about her bank balance making me jealous and she needed to go on a shopping spree. Sometimes it settled her. Often it didn't last more than a few minutes before the worry surfaced again. The memory care unit understandably discouraged residents from keeping personal cash, but I often broke that rule. Whenever I visited and could see that familiar agitation building, I'd press a few low value bills into her hand. Nothing significant, just the texture of something real. It worked in a way that words alone couldn't compete with. She'd look down at the money, close her fingers around it, and the tension would ease from her shoulders. She felt safe again, at least for a little while. Although, we often moved on to worrying about finding a purse to stash the bills in. For a woman who gave so little thought to money and nothing to status, I found it striking, strange even, that financial anxiety was what surfaced when the rational layers of her mind were stripped away. It made me think about what dementia actually reveals. It doesn't invent fears, it sometimes uncovers them. The fog clears away the learned, the sophisticated, the socially conditioned, and leaves something older and more fundamental underneath. At the time, I read up on this anxiety, there's some neuroscience behind it. Emotional memory, the kind wired to survival and feeling rather than fact, is stored differently in the brain and tends to be far more resilient. Dementia strips back the rational layers first. What it sometimes leaves behind is older, deeper, and harder to reach. In my mum's case, that something was the primal need to feel secure. She had grown up shaped by post-war austerity, widowhood, and years of careful budgeting on a single income. She would have been a young woman when rationing finally ended. In the world she grew up in, money wasn't abstract: it was coal for the fire and food on the table, shoes that lasted another winter without needing replacing. I think that connection between having and feeling safe wasn't a conclusion she'd reasoned her way to. It was lived, year after year, until it settled somewhere beneath thought entirely. Security and money had become inseparable, written into her long before she ever had reason to question it. I've thought about this a lot since we lost her. The concept of financial security isn't just something we think about, it seems to be something we feel, right down in the oldest parts of ourselves. It runs beneath logic, beneath personality, beneath even memory. My mum could and did forget my name on a bad day, but she could not shake the feeling that not having money meant not being safe. That instinct had been laid down so early and reinforced so consistently across a lifetime that dementia, for all its cruelty, couldn't fully reach it. To me, it says something profound about how deeply rooted our relationship with money really is. It seems to be wrapped around the core of our being. Losing my mum the way I did, piece by piece and conversation by conversation, was one of the hardest things I've been through. But in the heartbreak, she gave me this unexpected insight, pressed into my mind just as firmly as I had secretly pressed those bills into hers. Beneath everything we build and believe and become, there are feelings so fundamental they outlast nearly everything else. She reminded me that understanding our relationship with money isn't just a financial exercise, it's a deeply human one. Maybe it goes some way to explaining why we make choices that are sometimes irrational. And she did it, characteristically, without ever meaning to teach me a thing.

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Mark Crothers is a retired small business owner from the UK with a keen interest in personal finance and simple living. Married to his high school sweetheart, with daughters and grandchildren, he knows the importance of building a secure financial future. With an aversion to social media, he prefers to spend his time on his main passions: reading, scratch cooking, racket sports, and hiking.