We found out that we were the newest victims of identity theft a short time after my mom had offered to buy us identity theft insurance. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that it was even happening – one of our credit cards had a few charges on it that we didn’t recognize and we thought it was a simple computer error or something along those lines.

Banks make mistakes. Sarah and I have seen them before. Numbers don’t match up, late charges are assessed when they shouldn’t be, all kinds of mistakes happen with banks and credit card companies.

This time, we had three charges on a credit card that neither Sarah or I remembered making. Two of the charges were for gas and the third was for a good amount at a grocery store.

We called the credit card company and they initiated an investigation. They put the charges on hold until the investigation could run its course.

But investigations can take a while – and of course while it was going on with this card, this guy was going out and using our personal information for other things.

My dad worked in one job – as a teacher – for over 30 years. My mom was a teacher for over 33 years.

They lived for 30 years in the same Los Angeles house that they bought back in the early 1970’s for about $30,000 or so. They sold that house a short time ago for over $700,000 and moved to Omaha, where they had a much nicer but much less expensive house built for them to live in.

Grandkids, you see.

From the time I was old enough to understand the fundamental concepts underlying risk and return (which according to my dad still hasn’t really happened), my parents have been drilling into me the importance of insurance.

Their house was completely covered for fire loss, wind damage, earthquake damage, theft – anything you can think of. Their cars were always fully insured. They maintained health insurance on each other as well as themselves – and each covered the whole family with their health insurance so that their out of pocket expenses for medical bills were very, very small.

Throughout their lives, my parents have been sensible, dependable people who didn’t ever want to worry about losing their house, their cars – their general way of life – to some chance moment of fate.

For the most part, I thought they were absolutely boring. And they were. Oh, I still listened to their advice for the most part, because it was the same advice I’d heard from countless other sources of wisdom who get paid big bucks to go on television and tell me the same things my parents would tell me.

I bought full coverage car insurance and kept my deductible reasonable. I bought renters insurance for less than it cost me to eat out once a week. I picked up health insurance from the college. Once Sarah and I were married, I bought enough life insurance to cover several years worth of her living expenses.

So it’s not that I didn’t know to buy insurance, and it’s not that I didn’t know that insurance existed for identity theft. I’d heard the Lifelock commercials on radio and seen the television ads, and I thought I knew what it was about – and it wasn’t about me.

I think that, at the time my mom offered to buy me a Lifelock subscription for a year, my opinion on the matter was that credit identity theft was something that happened to careless people and that credit card companies and the credit bureaus have it in their best interest to work with their customers.

I was wrong on both counts, as I’ll tell you about in a later entry.

My mom and I had a conversation about Lifelock about halfway through the year Sarah and I moved into our newer apartment. I think I had seen the information packet that Lifelock sends out to new customers and she saw me looking at it. As I rolled my eyes, my mom told me that she and dad had just signed up for Lifelock because they’d known a few of their friends who had gone through a instance or two of attempted identity theft and that those friends had good experience with the identity theft insurance that Lifelock gives them.

I think she caught my general attitude of “Whatever” because I remember she told me, “You know how your dad and I feel about insurance.”

Yes, mom. I do. I know, I know, I know.

My mother, being a truly excellent mother who is patient with her wayward son, asked if I would like her to buy me a subscription to Lifelock. I, being a wayward son who doesn’t deserve his mother, told her that I didn’t buy into the hype and that it’d be a waste of 10 bucks a month.

My mom responded to that the way she always responds when I don’t do what she wants me to do:

It’s your life and your choice.

I kick myself today for not taking her up on the offer when she offered it the first time. After all, Lifelock protects you with that million-dollar guarantee the moment you sign up, before you even receive the paperwork, even. As soon as you give them your credit card information, you’re covered and essentially have nothing to worry about when it comes to identity theft.

So yeah, I should have let her spring for a subscription. Mom was right.

She got a job as an accountant with a local workers insurance company, where she works to this day.

I did student teaching for 5 months and graduated with my teaching certificate. After interviewing with 3 different school districts, I was given 2 offers of employment and finally chose to work within the Omaha Public School district.

While our lives were unfolding, so was the plan of the guy who stole our personal information out of our mailbox.

In the span of a few months, Sarah and I went from making less than $20,000 a year in combined income to making more than triple that. We needed that income, because we had to start paying on our student loans once we graduated.

Life was good. With our new careers, we moved out of the small apartment and into a better one located closer to where Sarah worked and further from the city’s crime zones.

With the jump in our income, we started to play a little bit more with credit. Neither Sarah or I had really had much in the way of credit before we graduated. We had large sums in student loans of course, but I had one credit card that I had used since I started college and Sarah had 3 or four that she used irregularly. I would guess that we had good credit ratings, because we weren’t ever denied for any credit when we applied for some.

We set up a credit account at Best Buy using that Rewards Zone card.. Sarah and I both purchased Apple laptops there. We sold Sarah’s old Mazda 3 and bought a new Honda Civic. We furnished our apartment nicely, but not too nice, since we decided that we were saving for a house.

Basically, we went and opened a bunch of lines of credit in our names, like millions of other couples do every year. We had no idea that the guy who had stolen our personal information out of our mailbox was doing the exact same thing.

While we were out living our normal lives, this guy was living what he considered a normal life – stealing from other people. We know for sure that very early on, he managed to open a credit card line in my name – and the limit on that card was pretty high. We found out later that he sold our information to a bunch of other people online, and found out even later that the information that was bought was then used and resold.

We just didn’t notice it at all. We had no idea that this guy was out there. How could we? Like most people, we didn’t check our credit report on a regular basis. There was no need, we thought, because we never were denied for credit.

We had a lot to learn.

We started out like many couples, with both of us working hard to finish our undergraduate degrees and just managing to scrape by with part-time jobs.

Before either of us graduated, Sarah was working at Bed, Bath and Beyond and I was working at Chili’s as an assistant manager. We didn’t make a lot of money at that point and, as a result, we lived in a pretty small apartment in midtown.

As people who live in Omaha know, midtown is a pretty safe area but it does border some not-so-safe parts of town. While we never really had any problems like some of our neighbors did (one actually had his apartment broken into), our mailbox was broken into a few times and we guessed that some of our mail was stolen.

We really didn’t take it seriously. I mean, it’s not like I was getting much in the way of important mail. Bills were just about the only thing that showed up on a regular basis. Sure, we got some junk mail, and yes we received some credit card offers now and then – we didn’t know how important that junk mail and those credit card offers were at that point, however.

Well, it turns out that someone wanted a few of those credit card offers that had been sent to me, along with a few other pieces of information that was sent in the mail. That information is in high demand with those people who make their living through credit identity theft and credit identity fraud.

The information that was stolen right out of our mailbox was enough for whoever stole my identity to get a nice head start at screwing with our credit and creating a huge headache for Sarah and I.