Keep an eye on your garbage!

Keep an eye on your garbage! You never know where who's looking at it.

My wife and I have been feverishly cleaning out all the junk we've accumulated over ten years. We are staging for our listing next week. So we had about a dozen large bags filled with garbage, which I placed out in front of our home last night, for pick up today.

Around ten last night, my wife called me to the window in our dining room. There was a truck pulled over in front of my home. Two people were going through the garbage bags. It was dark, so i couldn't make out all that was going on. I didn't think too much of it. I just assumed they were looking for anything salvageable. After they were done, they moved on to my neighbors garbage.

This morning on my way out to work, I went to put some newspapers in the recycling bin. I also wanted to make sure the "treasure hunters" had not made a mess out front. Well, they had indeed made a mess and about half of the bags were gone. I started to clean up the mess and saw an envelope sitting on the street. I picked it up to find an unopened bank statement for my wife. Yikes!!! I can only hope it was the only one there. Who knows what they were really looking for. Who knows if they picked up another bank statement.

We are normally extremely careful about shredding anything that may have personal information in it. I honestly don't know how that slipped by us. But, it just goes to show, you can't be too careful. So, I will carefully monitor our bank accounts and credit card statements for a while. I have personally been through identity theft before and it was not fun. It took several years to get everything straightened out.

So, keep any eye on your garbage. Make sure thete's nothing in it to get you in financial hot water.