Archive for September 2017
Equifax, one of the three credit agencies, had their computer system hacked. As a result, 143 million Americans (and some Canadians and Britons) had their sensitive personal information, such as their name, address, birthday, social security number and credit card information compromised. You should assume you are one of the victims and take the following steps to protect yourself:
Step 1: Sign up for AnnualCreditReport.com
By law, you are entitled to one credit report per year from each credit agency. Since there are three credit agencies (Equifax, Experian and Transunion), you may stagger your requests and get one credit report every four months. AnnualCreditReport.com is a website jointly operated by the three credit agencies that provides a centralized location for requesting your annual free credit reports.
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In December 2016, I wrote about how I came to know a little girl in rural China who suffers from thalassemia and decided to pay for her blood transfusions that cost $150 every 40 days. I called that my best investment in 2016 and I truly felt that way.
Since then, I have sent $150 to them every month and kept in touch with them on WeChat.
Apparently Jia Jia’s homework essay did not touch only me, it also touched many other people. In the end, they received the equivalent of about $50k in donations.
Grandma took her to the best children’s hospital in Tianjin to seek treatment. One week’s stay there set them back more than $3000 and they decided they couldn’t afford that. So they came back to their town to seek treatment in the provincial hospital.
One day I got an essay from Jia Jia talking about how happy her grandma was, more happy than she had ever seen her. It turns out that Jia Jia needed a bone marrow transplant to cure the disease and a donor had been found.
But there was just a little problem. The provincial hospital had only successfully done bone marrow transplants on adults.
The Investment Scientist 