Every piece of financial advice these days says get your free credit report! Okay, I got it. Who's going to teach me how to read it? I can't make heads nor tails of it and I suspect that's intentional. That industry will be goddamned before they'll give anything away that doesn't require their experts to make use…

Some types of identity theft are much harder to detect than others— one that I come across literally every day is multiple people using the same social security number, with some people's SSN being associated with up to 6 or 7 different people at the same time. I see it at a rate of nearly 10% of all SSNs I come…