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I thought password managers were overkill until my neighbor in Dayton showed me his notebook
For years I kept every password in a little paper address book by my desk because I figured nobody was ever going to break into my house to steal it. A few months back my neighbor across the street, a retiree named Walt, asked me to help him set up his new laptop, and while we were working he pulled out his own system. It was a spiral notebook with about 60 logins written in ballpoint, and he kept it in the drawer next to his checkbook. I laughed at first, then he told me his email had been broken into twice and both times the person got in through a password he had reused on some shopping site. What stuck with me was what he said next: the notebook itself was never the problem, the problem was that he used the same three passwords everywhere. He had been locked out of his own bank for a week. I went home that night and started moving my accounts into a free password manager, and it took me maybe two weekends to get everything switched over. The hard part was not the app, it was changing the 20 or so accounts I had reused the same password on since 2009. If you are still on paper like I was, what finally pushed you to switch, or are you sticking with the notebook?
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ray_burns1mo ago
Well, that notebook was doing its job just fine until Walt went and reused the same three passwords everywhere, so really the paper never stood a chance. I had a similar setup, a little index card taped inside a kitchen cabinet, and I figured burglars do not care about my electric bill login. What got me was when my bank locked me out after someone tried my old password from a site that got hacked back in 2014. Two weekends of changing passwords is a small price compared to a week locked out of your own money, so I made the switch too. The notebook was never the enemy, it was the copy and paste habit.
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