Look it over and report any errors, omissions or other anomalies.

• You can pay a service to monitor your credit, but beware of fraud, additional fee-based services and services promised but not delivered. Regularly obtaining your own credit report and following the steps below could be all you need.

• Turn off the paper trail. Sign up for online account statements and bill payments, preferably through a single trusted provider such as a financial institution or portal, where payment information, passwords, settings and monitoring can be consolidated. Choose services with a no-liability guarantee of payment, on an easy-to-use site with extended-hours customer service. Likewise sign up for automatic payroll deposits, automatic bill payments and other automatic transfers of money.

• Go digital with existing accounts and discontinue paper statements. If you print from your online account, safely store copies, and use a confetti shredder to discard documents by reducing them to tiny bits of paper.

• Don't be a technophobe. Gain confidence in online finance management by test-using a bill payment service to pay yourself $1 and see what happens. Also use hard-to-guess unique passwords, based on information only you know, change them regularly and record them in a safe place. Include e-mail based account "alerts" you can customize with triggers based on your spending habits, but also check online accounts weekly.

• Don't discard a computer without fully erasing all personal data by zeroing out or fully wiping all personal data to disallow data recovery.

• Filter out and ignore spam, unknown online merchants and fraud-heavy online areas like adult websites. Don't respond to email that suggests you click a link in the email to sign on to update information. Log onto your site through its known URL address.

• Use a secure mailbox at home and at work for paper mail. Retrieve paper mail promptly after delivery. Never place outgoing checks in your home mailbox. Never leave personal information, say, your return address on an envelope addressed to your bank or other account in plain view, say, in your car or on your desktop at work.

• Never give out your Social Security number, driver's license, passwords or other account numbers or private information unless you initiate the call or transaction.

• Know in advance what to do with each account if fraud is detected. Photocopy or scan into your computer images of the contents of your wallet or purse in case of theft. If fraud is detected, contact credit bureaus, creditors and other relevant parties and take advantage of all recourse and protection provisions of federal and state law.

• Add your name to federal and state Do Not Call registries, and direct marketing opt-out lists. If you are already on the lists, be sure your opt out is up to date.

  The federal Do Not Call Registry, for example, was created in 2003 and blocked most solicitous calls for those who registered, but only for five years. with each registration. The first wave of registrations is due to expire in 2008.

• If you are an ID theft victim you can also, for free, call anyone of the three credit bureaus and have a fraud alert placed on your account to prevent future infractions as you sort out the mess. Contact one bureau to place a fraud alert on your credit report and that company is required to notify they other two so that they too place an alert on their versions of your report.