How To Manage Your Passwords as a Real Estate Investor

Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Welcome back everyone, to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Happy you're here again. As always, got another nice little actionable item for you to consider today. I've got a question for you. When was the last time you entered a password for something? I'll give you a second to think about it. Go ahead, go ahead. Okay. It wasn't that long ago, right? It was probably today. I mean, and you maybe did it multiple times today. Maybe you had your password saved by Google Autofill or something like that, which that's great. But the reality is we need a password for everything these days. Like everything, there's just layers and layers of passwords and usernames and if we use the same one all the time, that isn't very secure. So we need other options. And that's what we're going to talk about today. An app that I use, how to use it and how it will really help you in your rental business and just in your personal life in general, as you scale. Because as you scale, the more passwords you need and the more people you might need to access those username and passwords. So I was opening another Internet account today because I'm just getting ready to launch another property. Woohoo. Excited for that. And so I called up to open another Internet account and of course I need another username and password and I don't know how many accounts I have with this same company. This is Comcast in the US if any of you guys are familiar with them, they have a bit of a monopoly and they're not, let's just say their customer service is not up to par a lot of times. I heard there's some other options coming out. Elon Musk is launching a satellite one which we won't need cables or anything like that anymore. And it's going to be high speed. I heard that it's going to be available in the US and Canada this year 2020. So that would be awesome. That would be amazing. But for now, still working off older model Internet, I guess. So we've got cable going. So anyways, I need another username and password and it just got me think, oh my gosh, if I didn't have this app that I'm using, I would literally waste like days of my life. Like if you add it up all the time that I, if I weren't using this app, would need to retrieve Username and passwords and all those things. Like it would literally take days of my life. So let's talk about it. I mean, what do we need passwords for? I know, you know how important how everyone wants you to create account, but let's just go over a few because they really start to add up. I mean I literally have probably hundreds of different username and passwords in my app. I use Keeper, I'm gonna share a link at the bottom. I'm not affiliated with them anyway, but highly, highly recommend it. So I'll go over some of their features, some of the typical accounts that we have with our short term rental business, some useful pointers with this app, and just for storing passwords in general, how we can share them with our team. And then lastly, maybe the best, the biggest resistance to using an app like this is the security. So we'll cover that a little bit as well. So I use Keeper and in there I store passwords for everything. And let's just go over a few here. So for a short term rental business for our property and our investing business, we have our OTA accounts. So those are online travel agencies like Airbnb and VRBO and booking.com and TripAdvisor. So the more of those you have, the more passwords you have. Of course our banking, we need username and passwords for that, but then there's multi levels to that. So you know, for those different accounts we need PIN numbers, we have different checking account and routing numbers. We have logins for our mortgage loans. If you have a bookkeeper, a lot of these banks have shareable access. So then they have their own username and passwords. So there's a ton just in the banking sector, which makes sense. That's one of the things we want to keep most secure. And in line with that we've got QuickBooks. If you're using that for your accounting, or whatever system you're using for your accounting, that might be through your management software, which again is another username and password. If you have short term and long term properties, you could have multiple programs for each of those. The Internet, but on top of the Internet you have routers, you know, so if you use Google routers or if you use Eero or some of the common ones, those have their own login, your guidebook, your pricing system, your note taking software, whether it's Microsoft or Evernote, your cloud storage, Google and Dropbox, insurance portals, property tax payment portals. If you have your own website, there's a login for that. Your Smart home devices, so smart locks and thermostats and TVs and noise monitors.

You get the picture. I mean, it's just like endless, endless. And if that's not enough, that's just a tidbit of the business related ones. But then we've got all of our personal ones too. So we've got things like health insurance and vehicle insurance and Pinterest accounts and social media accounts, Facebook and Instagram and any learning resources, YouTube. I don't want to bore you to death, but essentially every single thing that we do needs a username and password. So you get the point. And do you think that's going to change? No, I don't think so. We're going to need a username and password for a long time until they embed a chip in our ARM or something like that. So this isn't something that's going away soon. And another layer to all those username and passwords. Then you have your security questions. If you forget your username and passwords and then if you have multiple emails, then they're sending a password back to whatever email you have on file. I mean, it's just like, oh my gosh, utility accounts. I didn't even mention that. But if you've got a lot of short term rentals, we're paying for the utilities. So I've got a lot, dozens of properties now and each property's got multiple utility accounts. So there's literally, I mean there's like hundreds. I mean, if I went through and counted all these things, there's no way you can keep all those passwords in your head and you want them to be secure. How do we manage all these? Well, I use an app called Keeper and Keeper will manage all my username and passwords and any notes and the web links to log into those. So sometimes, you know, these portals have different links to get in and that in itself is complicated, finding the right login. So you can save all that under one file or one record. But then a cool thing with Keeper, and I'm sure a lot of the other ones do this as well. You can store those and folders have like an assistant folder, for example, she has access to certain things and I have a bookkeeping folder and they have access to certain things. And then I have one for my management company that manages my own properties and that has a lot of access for multiple people on my team. So I basically can share with them. I can move these passwords or copy them into any of these folders, easily share them with someone and then anytime I update anything on my end, it updates on their end automatically. So there's no like, you know, running back and forth or anything like that. And then you have the autofill option which is fantastic. And we're gonna get to the security here right after that. I know that's kind of scary for some people to have all their information on there, but this autofill saves days off your life, like even more than that. Who knows? If we were to add all this up and going forward, I mean it could be weeks, who knows? I've been using Keeper for years and I could not imagine not using it. My life would be a cluster. I use it every day or any day I'm on my computer, I should say, or on my phone. That's another great thing about it. It links between my phone, between my iPad, between my PC computer. So it goes across platforms, Android and Apple and anytime I update one somewhere it updates the other one. So huge, huge time saver. But is it safe? I believe it is. You gotta think this company, that's their whole business model is keeping passwords safe. So that's what they're focused on 100% of the time. And they have millions of people that have used it or that are using it and thousands of businesses and they have an enterprise solution to make it easy for big businesses too. It's hosted on Amazon web servers which are secure. It's got all the latest and greatest security stuff, 256 bit encryption which some of that kind of goes over my head but I know that's like one of the best ones. And it's encrypted at a device level, not in keepers cloud, somewhere up in the cloud on the Internet it's got the multi factor authentication. You know, you guys are all used to this I'm sure by now. So if it doesn't recognize the device you're on, then you get a text message or an email. In order to prove that you are who you are, you have to go through this multi level security. You have one master password. So you want to guard that baby. Well, there was a time like a few years ago where I switched computer or something, I lost it and I was able to get it back. They have great support too by the way. So I, you know, call them, talked with them on chat and able to retrieve things that way. So this is what happens if you're not using one of these. You've probably got this like standard password that you use that you, that you edit based on what the site's asking for. So some might say, you know, they need a capital letter and a certain amount of letters or a special character or numbers, no spaces, all these different requirements for the different websites. And, and so a cool thing about Keeper as well as it'll generate passwords for you, you just hit a little button and boom. And it creates really secure ones so you don't have to, you know, use the same one for everything. So you've got stronger passwords for all of your logins as well. So to sum it up, if you're not using a password program of some sort, check one of these out. I know Apple has their own, Google has their own as well, but I don't know if they get as elabor as Keeper does. That's designed specifically for passwords. It has a Google Chrome extension too. So you can install it over the top of Google and it'll know when you're trying to log into a site. You click the Keeper button, boom. Logs you right, right in. So it saves literally, I mean like weeks off your life and frustration having to reset passwords makes it easier for your team and it doesn't cost like anything when you break it down. So Keeper, for example, I just checked and I'll leave a link in the show notes again, I'm not like affiliated with them in any way. It's just something that'll hopefully help you out if you're not already using a system like this. 73 bucks for three years, that's like 6 cents a day. So for 6 cents a day you don't have to fluster around trying to find a username or password. You always have secure ones, they're on all your devices and your team has access to whatever they need to. So for six cents a day I think that's some serious bargain. If you're not using one of these applications, check it out. It's going to help you with your rental business, it's going to help you with your short term rentals, but just your personal life in general and help you free up time so you can continue acquiring properties on a quicker and quicker basis. Until next time, have a wonderful day.

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