Are there any dangers in publicly sharing my personal finance data?
"Status alone shouldn't be a problem. A fellow blogger publishes a blogger list at Rock Star Finance where he lists nearly 1000 personal finance bloggers web sites. You can see that many of them publicly offer their numbers.   What you need to consider is whether you are anonymous, or if friends and family will know it's you. ""Hey Tev, you have no debt and already saved XXX francs? Can you lend me ZZ francs to buy....?"" That is the greater risk. The potential larger risk for the higher worth people is that of targeted theft.  (Interesting you couldn't find this via search, the PF blogging community is large, mature, and continuing to grow.)" I think it's advisable to exercise a fair amount of caution when posting information about yourself online. With the advances in data aggregation efforts, information that would have been considered sufficiently anonymized in years past might no longer be sufficient to protect you from bad actors online. For example, depending on which state, and even which county you live in, the county recorder's office may allow anyone with Internet access to freely search property records by your name. If they know approximately where you live (geolocation from the IP address that you use to post to a blog--which could be divulged if criminals compromised the blogging site) and your surname, they might be able to find your exact address if you own your home. If you have considerable wealth it could open you to targeted ransom attacks from organized criminals.
Account statements and the account information provided by your personal finance software should be coming from the same source, namely your bank's internal accounting records. So in theory one is just as good as the other. That being said, an account statement is a snapshot of your account on the date the statement was created, while synchronizations with your personal finance application is dynamically generated upon request (usually once a day or upon login).  So what are the implications of this? Your account statement will not show transactions that may have taken place during that period but weren't posted until after the period ended (common with credit card transactions and checks). Instead they'd appear on the next statement. Because electronic account synchronizations are more frequent and not limited to a specific time period those transactions will show up shortly after they are posted. So it is far easier to keep track of your accounts electronically. Every personal finance software I've ever used supports manual entries so what I like to do is on a daily basis I manually enter any transaction which wasn't posted automatically. This usually only takes a few minutes each evening. Then when the transaction eventually shows up it's usually reconciled with my manually entered one automatically.  Aside from finding (infrequent) bank errors this has the benefit of keeping me aware of how much I'm spending and how much I have left. I've also caught a number of cashier errors this way (noticing I was double-charged for an item while entering the receipt total) and its the best defense against fraud and identity theft I can think of. If you're looking at your accounts on a daily basis you're far more likely to notice an unusual transaction than any monitoring service. As far as I understand, equifax collects data about individuals and scores their credit worthiness. The ceo did Jack shit about keeping all that private data safe, so they got hacked and all that data is now in someone else's hands. The possible implications? Large scale identify fraud of anyone whose details got stolen, since it encompasses everything  that is needed for that. And that is besides the privacy violation. There is a possibility of misuse. Hence it should be shared judiciously. Sharing it with large / trusted organization reduces the risk as there would be right process / controls in place. Broadly these days PAN and other details are shared for quite a few transactions, say applying for a Credit Card, Opening Bank Account, Taking a Phone connection etc. In most of the cases the application is filled out and processed by 3rd party rather than the service provider directly.  Creating Fake Employee records is a possibility so is the misuse to create a fake Bank account in your name and transact in that account. Since one cannot totally avoid sharing PAN details to multiple parties... It helps to stay vigilant by monitoring the Form 26AS from the Govt website. Any large cash transactions / additional salary / or other noteworthy transactions are shown here. It would also help to monitor your CIBIL reports that show all the Credit Card and other details under your name. **Why are we collecting emails?** The email is for two purposes. (1) so we can let you know when challenges become available, and (2) so that we can send your payment, and contact the raffle winner.  The survey will also ask about: investment experience, portfolio size, and education. This is crucial to interpreting the results scientifically.   All data will be stored on a secured server, and **your personal information will never be shared with anyone.** Any data made available during publication will be fully anonymized according to best practices. I think you leave out the major problem of your partners in crime there.    Chances are one of them will eventually slip up later in life, and at some point snitch on you in order to get out of trouble.  This is particularly true if you would manage to acquire amounts in the 100k range per participant.  The inside man would pose the greatest risk there. I use two different brokerages, both well-known. I got a bit spooked during the financial crisis and didn't want to have all my eggs in one basket. The SIPC limits weren't so much a factor. At the time, I was more worried about the hassle of dealing with a Lehman-style meltdown. If one were to fail, the misery of waiting and filing and dealing with SIPC claims would be mitigated by having half of my money in another brokerage. In hindsight, I was perhaps a bit too paranoid. Dealing with two separate brokerages is not much of an inconvenience, though, and it's interesting to see how their web interfaces are slightly different and some things are easier to do with one vs the other. Overall, they're really similar and I can't say there's much advantage (other than my tin-foil hat tendencies) to splitting it up like that. The reason people like Mint is because it allows you to see all of your financial details in one place. When you create an account, you’re able to link all of your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts. This linking enables Mint to update your transactions automatically. The catch is that you have to provide the username and password you use for each one, which can certainly make you feel jittery if you’re worried about a security breach. Mint is designed to be a read-only service, which means you can’t transfer money back and forth between accounts. If someone were to get their hands on your Mint login, all they’d be able to do is view your balances and transactions. Your full account numbers aren’t displayed, nor are your bank account or credit card usernames and passwords. The only thing that would be visible would be your email address. If a hacker was interested in taking things a step further, there’s always the possibility that they could physically steal the information from Mint’s secure servers – but that’s really a long shot. That would require knowing where the servers are located, bypassing the physical security measures that are in place, and cracking the code on how the data is encrypted. If that were to happen, then your personal information might be at risk, but so far, there’s no record of it being attempted. I was very skeptical of Mint and how secure it truly was. I did my fair share of research. Try looking at: couple questions for clarification:  1. Investment firm is a pretty broad term. Do you mean Registered Investment Advisory firm or broker/dealer, or something else?  2. Are you asking if they can reveal who they generally custody assets with? if so yes, they are always willing to give this out and many firms use multiple custodians. If you are asking if they can reveal client information and where the assets are held, then no, absolutely not, the only reason they could legally give this out is if the feds inquired or if a court order was issued. In my opinion, We can't trust wholy on internet as well as social media. There are a lot of hackers that can ruin all of us based on destroying all the systems. We should be careful about our private information, don't show them on your facebook if you don't want anyone can see them, even though it is only for you. It is not safe for you. Just keep in your mind or your note book. "I'd strongly advise against this though as you'll create a connection on each of your Credit Reports to the other individual. If either of you have major debt problems down the line, you'll have to ""disassociate"" yourselves with the credit agencies to break the link. Why not just have an envelope of cash that you use to go shopping with? No hassle and you can keep it safe somewhere in the house..." What is the minimum information someone would need to know about me to wire money out of my brokerage account? In today's world, there could be sufficient info on the statement that can be coupled with info available in other sources and together this info in wrong hands could be an issue. I should probably encrypt the drive. Yes it does make sense Assuming you have no non-public material information, it should be perfectly legal. I suspect it's not a great idea for the reasons that Joe outlined, but it should be legal. "Yes, I did. I won't deny it. But, as I said in my original post - ""I don't know much about this subject [finances]"". Well, that's why I came  here to ask a question. I don't know what ""trusted"" sources are in this field - it's not as if there are real scientific journals in this field as in biology (my profession). So... is this a problem in your view?" There is nothing to worry about. There is absolutely nothing unusual about moving money between your own accounts, even if they are in separate financial institutions. I moved $200,000 when I was getting ready to by my house; I have moved similar sized chunks for other purposes. A large transfer may get some attention to make sure you aren't doing anything illegal with the money and aren't being scammed... but if the transaction is legitimate, that attention is harmless. I wanted to know how safe is such investment with online banks vis-a-vis regular banks? As far as I know, neither money market accounts nor savings accounts have any investment risk (within reason) since both are insured by the FDIC. Note that this is not necessarily the case with money market funds. is their any downside to such investments? Yes, there are a few. I believe the two biggest ones  are: