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I'm so glad you're with us on the Clark Howard show where it's about you being empowered with knowledge so that you can save more and spend less.

And don't let anyone ever rip you off.

You want the opposite of ripoffs? You want deals? Check out ClarkDeals.com.

And check me out at Clark.com.

And a half hour from now, how are we going to get people back to work?

There's one area of the economy that we got to face up to and I got the prescription I believe we need to use.

I'm going to talk right now about something that is a continuous issue here on our show and that's people who've discovered their identity has been swiped.

I.D. theft has been a problem even before it had a name back in the mid 90s when it first came on my radar on our show and has continued to be a thorn in the side of most every company in America, certainly every financial institution, credit card issuer.

And then consumers who've been hit by identity theft particularly full identity theft where somebody takes over your full identity and buys things as if they're you get credit as if they're you.

It's a nasty thing.

So I put a special emphasis on talking about what things you should do that won't cost you anything to protect yourself as much as you can from things going on in the market and then things that will cost you a little bit.

Think about credit freeze is something that I've talked about that's a way that you lock down your identity for credit purposes.

And it's a way that gives you more peace of mind, but you got to pay depending on the state summer free, but others you pay somewhere between three and $10 to freeze your credit.

There are people don't want to freeze their credit, but they'd like to know things are okay.

Then the past I've talked about civic civic.com that offered free credit monitoring and they are no longer free as I've heard from any of a number of people who have signed up with civic based on me talking about it.

Civic now is $30 a year for credit monitoring identity theft insurance.

And they have a service that helps you get your credit back under your control, protect your you know, restore your good name and identity and even a number of things, but it's not free anymore 30 bucks a year.

It does compare quite favorably to what you pay for so many the heavily promoted and advertised credit monitoring and credit protection services doing it at $30 a year where many of those are as much as $15 to $20 a month.

But the idea of paying I'm not excited about that, but so you're paying it a discount.

The other alternative is credit karma with credit karma you have free credit monitoring is one of the things you have when you're a credit karma member and they do many of the same things you'd have with the paid credit monitoring service.

I'd say civic is more thorough with what they provide at $30 a year, but credit karma sure gets you in the game for nothing.

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