How to secure your money abroad

 

Nothing ruins a vacation like a monetary crisis.

 The risks are certainly there. 

An online report by dailyworth.com? gives some tips to help you protect your money abroad, prepare for emergencies, and prevent overspending.

• Inform your bank before the trip: Be as detailed as possible about where you will be (hotels, specific cities and the countries).
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•  Most banks let you do it online.
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•  Before you leave, make sure you have your bank’s international contact information with you in case something goes wrong.
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• Don’t keep all your money in one place: Do not keep all your money in the same account or ATM.
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•  Having emergency money in traveller’s cheque as well as cash is a smart idea.
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• Enable online accounts: Assuming you don’t have online banking already, get it. 
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• Logging in to your account online will give you the option to verify your activities if you do get flagged, monitor your expenses, and keep an eye out for fraudulent charges.
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• Avoid airport currency exchanges: While it is convenient to exchange your money at the airport, the exchange rate will be less than favourable. 
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• Avoid unfair exchange rates by withdrawing money from an ATM or bank.
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• Get a no-foreign-transaction-fee credit or debit card: Most cards charge a premium for any international transaction, so you may want to open a no-foreign-transaction-fee credit or debit card before your trip.
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•  You should also use it to book your trip — flights on foreign airlines and hotel reservations can all be subject to international fees.
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•  Just make sure that your card offers a worldwide payment network, and do your research to make sure your travel destinations are covered.

Protecting your account

You should think carefully about choosing your password for your account. 

Your password should not be easy to guess, even to someone who knows you well.

Also, keep in mind the existence of “brute force” programmes, which use a set of words to generate possible passwords in order to attempt logging in to an account.

 Here are a few handy tips that should help you with choosing a secure password:

According to an online report on https://support.riotgames.com, your password should not contain words from any dictionary. 

This includes words spelled backwards.

 Dictionaries are often used to generate a list of possible passwords from common words and terms.

Use a combination of letters, numbers, special characters, spaces and capitalisation but keep in mind that their distribution is also very important.

 For example, “password123” is not very secure, but “bLu3!p8P3py” is extremely difficult to guess.

The longer the password, the less the chances that someone may be able to guess it.

 We recommend that you create a password that uses as many characters as possible.

Many programmess can detect common number/letter replacements (e.g. 5 for an S, 3 for an E, 1 for an I, etc.) so try and avoid these when creating your password.

 Also, try to avoid using keyboard sequences (e.g. 1234, qwert, zxasqw, asdasd, etc.) as these are commonly used to create passwords and are therefore often used by “Brute Force” programmes.

We recommend that you do not use your account name in your password, as if it is followed by numbers, special characters or other words it will make it easier to guess.

 Finally, try to use a unique password that is different from any of your other passwords (email account, social media websites, online bank account, other online game accounts, etc).

There are some good open source password managers that might help you keep track of various passwords and while we do not endorse or support a particular password manager, here is an example of such programme: