We all have a wide variety of passwords in our lives. So many it often times gets very hard to remember what the heck they all are. You have a password for your email, perhaps a second for a different email account, one for your bank, and one each for your online accounts, perhaps cell phones, television or a wide variety of other things.

With so many passwords to remember people often get lazy, we certainly do! While some people argue it’s ok to use the same password for everything as long as it is secure we beg to differ. Should someone come across your password they would gain access to literally all of your online accounts. The trouble is two pronged, the first is finding a way to remember all the various passwords you may have, and the second comes from needing to choose a secure password and the fact that the more secure they are the more difficult they are to remember. Below we will help address both issues.

Picking A Strong Password

What makes a password strong is pretty simple, at least from a logic standpoint. The more difficult it is to figure out the more secure it is. The larger variety of characters you use the better, replacing letters with symbols is a popular way to make simple passwords more secure. For example, a lot of people replace the letter “s” with a “$” a simple word like “password” becomes “pa$$word” much more secure. Also people like to replace the letter “o” with a zero. The word “password” becomes “pa$$w0rd” now, even more secure. You can see where we are going with this one. Below are a few things that factor into how secure a particular password is.

It measures your password by several factors:
• Number of Characters
• Uppercase Letters
• Lowercase Letters
• Numbers
• Symbols
• Middle Numbers or Symbols
• Requirements

How To Remember Your Passwords

The trouble with picking something really secure is it becomes sort of hard to remember. Add into that having multiple different passwords to remember for different websites and you’ve got quite a mess when it comes to your passwords. The best thing to do is just take a look at your own situation, if you have just a few passwords, it might be OK to use the same ones as long as it is very secure. The other approach is, and its the one we use is to use perhaps something easier to remember yet still secure for things like email and social media accounts.

Then use something a little more secure and unique for bank accounts and credit cards, things that need to be more secure. We like to keep our passwords in an excel spreadsheet, we have about 30 to keep track of so it gets kind of hairy. We also choose to password protect that excel file and do one thing so many people tend to forget, print it out! Keep a printout of all your passwords in a nice secure area in case something ever happened to your computer.

That is our advice on passwords, we would love to hear from you however, let us know if you’ve got a better system.