Are there any dangers in publicly sharing my personal finance data?
"Status alone shouldn't be a problem. A fellow blogger publishes a blogger list at Rock Star Finance where he lists nearly 1000 personal finance bloggers web sites. You can see that many of them publicly offer their numbers.   What you need to consider is whether you are anonymous, or if friends and family will know it's you. ""Hey Tev, you have no debt and already saved XXX francs? Can you lend me ZZ francs to buy....?"" That is the greater risk. The potential larger risk for the higher worth people is that of targeted theft.  (Interesting you couldn't find this via search, the PF blogging community is large, mature, and continuing to grow.)" I think it's advisable to exercise a fair amount of caution when posting information about yourself online. With the advances in data aggregation efforts, information that would have been considered sufficiently anonymized in years past might no longer be sufficient to protect you from bad actors online. For example, depending on which state, and even which county you live in, the county recorder's office may allow anyone with Internet access to freely search property records by your name. If they know approximately where you live (geolocation from the IP address that you use to post to a blog--which could be divulged if criminals compromised the blogging site) and your surname, they might be able to find your exact address if you own your home. If you have considerable wealth it could open you to targeted ransom attacks from organized criminals.
Something to consider is how broad is Yahoo! Finance taking in their data for making some comparisons.  For example, did you look at the other companies in the same industry?  On the Industry page, the Top Life Insurance Companies by Market Cap are mostly British companies which could make things a bit different than you'd think. Another point is how this is just for one quarter which may be an anomaly as the data could get a bit awkward if some companies are just coming back to being profitable and could have what appears to be great growth but this is because their earnings grow from $.01/share to $1/share which is a growth of $10,000 percent as this is an increase of 100 times but really this may just be from various accounting charges the company had that hit its reserves and caused its earnings to dip temporarily. "now that's just crazy talk. Politicians on capitol hill wouldn't dream about talking about any sort of *tangible* aspects of economy. Focusing on raw goods/commodities production through a campaign? Shit... that's PR suicide in every urban area (which immediately matters based on population numbers). Much easier to either reference your local military benefactors as ""job creators"" and espouse them if you have them. If you don't, then speak to an idealistic sentiment which entertains any willingness to jump to total warfare at a moment's notice. Once you fall out of favor with the military elite in the rest of the country, you are seen to be managing your community ""dangerously irresponsibly"" and ""frighteningly ignorant of the dangers in the world."" And, obviously, the biggest money is in technology people simply *can't* talk about publicly. It's unwise to ignore those efforts/finances, however.  The only flexible mainstay in the budget is Defense. Healthcare spending is, well, the term *gluttonous* comes to mind. Education? Lol. Right. Just put the kids in debt and go fuck yourself / have a nice day. Oh and don't forget your 306^^th monthly installation of your house payment. The other mainstay of the budget? Pensions. Good luck reforming that with the unions in any direction but toward the sky. Welfare? Welfare reforms generally play out really well in the media, don't they? Can you say, ""fuck you, poor people,"" any louder?   Defense. Defense is the only malleable entity in the budget but we all know it's easier for the commercial politicians® to purchase media campaigns and drum up not only a sentiment of war, but conditions for their own interests to secure new business in other countries. Teaching Americans to fear things about the world can be done and it costs about $150m per year in a single direction if you know someone who will take your money (gurgling network executives shitting their pants with good, old-fashioned Incontinence). If anyone was ever serious about turning greater profits from commercialization of military research, they'd improve the goddamned state of education in the country. [What a fucking farce.](http://i.imgur.com/22mZxCr.png)  There should be a plan in place to study the rate of the nominal value of domestic technological innovation, as best as can be perceived, and the spending elsewhere in the budget needs to be correlated to that figure directly. We cannot continue assuming innovation is constant in the United States while restricting education funding so heavily. It is such an embarrassment. And we're imperiling ourselves by finding supplementary, service-based revenue solutions by beating the same dead horse with financial policy. The guys at the Fed are tired. Believe me." Ahh the vest. The mark of a Finance professional. Seriously, I don't know of any other person outside of a Finance career that wears it. My theory is that it's warm and it lessens the need to re-tuck your shirt every few minutes for those that don't have tailored shirts. While it’s your personal choice on HOW you save for later its essential that you save. My sister works in a bank and recommended me not to put any money into retirement plans since the tax-advances seem fine but have to paid back when you take the money out of the accounts (in Switzerland, don't know about the united states). Many reasons exist that you suddenly need the money: Buying a house, needing a new car, health issues or just leaving the country forever (and the government trying to make it as hard as possible for you to get your money back). I recommend putting it on a savings account on a different bank that you normally use, without any cards and so on. In short: It can be dangerous to have money locked away – especially if you could easily have it at your hands and you know you're able to manage it. PayPal is free for buyers, taking their profit from the sellers -- in much the same way that credit cards take a percentage from the seller (though they will also charge you interest if you don't pay off the entire balance every month). As far as I know, there's nothing that keeps a vendor from having a different price for PayPal customers than cash customers... but that would show up in the number displayed by PayPal before you authorize the purchase, so if you're paying attention it shouldn't be possible to sneak it by you. PayPal has several modes of operation. I'm not aware of one where they hold your balance. Normally you either give them your credit card info, or you give them information about (one of your) bank account(s) and authorize them to do electronic funds transfer from and to that account on your behalf. I've always stuck with the credit card approach; I trust PayPal but I don't trust them that far, on principle. If I was going to link them to an account, it would be a small account I'd create for that purpose, NOT my main savings/checking accounts! (Hm. Actually, I do have one account which normally floats around $500 -- it's the one I dump accumulated pocket change into -- and I could use that. If I ever feel a need to do so.) PayPal does reduce the risk of credit card numbers being abused, by reducing how many people you've given the number to. Depending on what kinds of purchases you make, that may be a security advantage. It certainly doesn't hurt. Personally I have no problem with giving my card number directly to a serious business, but on eBay or sites of that sort where I'm dealing with individuals who are complete strangers I do like the isolation that PayPal provides. In other words, eBay is exactly the environment where I DO use PayPal. After all, that's exactly what PayPal was created for. Why would they do that? The data has value.  Bankruptcy isn't just shutting the doors, it's selling off the data.  I predict this will start a new firestorm around what happens to *your* data that you don't own.  People are about to realize that they're going to be fucked both ways. I would at least encrypt the part of the drive you keep forms like that, but not to protect myself from the odd villain who works for the IRS.   Your broker does report your capital gains to the IRS, whether in sales or dividends.   I received a bill last month from the IRS for dividends I forgot to report on my 2013 return. The bill contained a partial duplicate of my 1099-DIV form from the brokerage, and included account numbers and SSN. Therefore it's safe to say IRS employees don't need to hack your laptop in order to get that info. :) As for minimum information, it depends on your broker. Call them and ask; they'll tell you everything you need to know.  Vanguard, for example, has some security questions, among other things. This is interesting.  The application I'm putting together is more along the lines of automating the research process for a financial professional using a personal algorithm of his.  The end goal is to provide him an alert to email when a new report is filed and if his criteria are met based on that report and past reports.  Thanks anyway.