My wife and I had finally saved enough for a down payment and also found the perfect home for our growing family. Our offer was accepted and now it was time to get approved for financing. Completing a home loan application just isn’t something can be done in five minutes. The lenders want to know every single detail of your financial history and that is when it dawned on me just how much of my private data I was providing to some complete stranger.

Last week, I came across a piece in the Greensburg Tribune-Review about identity fraud. The write-up in my local paper was about how someone at a respectable mortgage lender utilized his access to client credit applications to go shopping online. They had individuals social security numbers, date of birth, work history – everything needed to begin opening accounts. You never think identity fraud could happen to you right up until it does. But what was I going to do? Pay cash for homes? That wasn’t the answer. You can’t live your lives in a cave but this all got me seriosuly thinking about identity theft protection.

Deciding to obtain identity fraud protection is the easy part, attempting to review services and companies becomes slightly more complicated. Just like most people, I decided to start my research on the web but if you choose to do a search for “identity theft reviews” or “Lifelock review” you’ll come across countless sites offering contradicting opinions about what service is best or even what features you might want to consider.

You will find there are basically two ways identity theft services can protect you. The first is through detection which includes closely monitoring your credit report. The second measure is prevention consisting of placing fraud alerts with your credit report. Most of the companies I reviewed also offered a 1 million dollar guarantee.Although most of the plans shared features that were similiar, some of the differences were significant like family plans from TrustedID or advanced credit monitoring from Identity Guard. Most of the services were priced around $10per month.

After investing several hours engaging in my own analysis , I came to the realization the appropriate service provider for me was Lifelock. In addition to being the market standard in identity theft protection products and services, Lifelock recently launched the Lifelock Command Center where they scan public databases for the misuse of your private data. This is on top of all the things Lifelock already does on your behalf. I came across a meticulous lifelock review here that thoroughly explains everything you might want to know on the subject of identity theft prevention.

An identity protection program such as this is exactly everything that I was looking for. I didn’t want to end up being all stressed out, afraid to submit a mortgage application. There was no need to hide from dangers, I just needed to take precautions against them.