What the experts say

Too many choices; Canceling a gym membership; Safeguard your card data

Too many choices

Are your investment options overwhelming you? asked Carl Richards in The New York Times. The sheer number of available choices for parking your cash can make your head spin. There are almost 25,000 investment options among mutual funds and exchange-traded funds alone. “Realistically, you could spend your entire life looking for the perfect investment.” Don’t drive yourself crazy; just “use a broadly diversified, low-cost index fund” and call it a day. Excessive choice can be a paralyzing trap in any financial scenario, whether you’re buying a house or a new insurance policy. “We could spend the rest of our lives researching an ever-increasing number of choices and searching for perfect, but to what end? We have better things to do.”

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Safeguard your card data

You have to work harder to make your credit card payments safe, said Byron Acohido in USA Today. “The U.S. stands alone as a modern nation that continues wide use of magnetic striped payment cards.” Other nations long ago switched to chip-embedded cards, which are difficult to counterfeit. While U.S. businesses are slowly shifting, “magnetic striped cards aren’t going away anytime soon,” so you have to protect yourself. Start by having your card issuer set up behavioral alerts, which flag suspicious transactions based on your previous purchasing history. And avoid linking your debit card to your savings account to “reduce your risk profile.” Of course, plastic isn’t the sole risk: Mobile payments are becoming more popular, but they increase the number of “access points” through which attackers can steal your data.