Before you mail that check

Today's issue covers one thing: mailing checks, and the small habits that keep them from being stolen and rewritten.

Here is what happens to a stolen check. It gets "washed." Household chemicals remove the ink for the payee and the amount, your signature stays put, and the check gets rewritten to a new name for a much bigger number. Your account treats it as a check you signed, because you did.

You don't have to stop writing checks. You have to make yours not worth stealing:

1. Use a permanent gel ink pen. Standard ballpoint ink washes off easily. Permanent gel ink soaks into the paper fibers and resists the chemicals. Cheap fix, real difference. Keep one pen just for checks. (Skip the erasable pens for anything financial, erasable is the whole problem.)

2. Hand your mail to the post office, not the box. Outgoing mail sitting in an unlocked home mailbox with the flag up, or dropped in a street collection box overnight, is the easy target. Take bill payments inside the post office, or hand them to your carrier. And collect your incoming mail promptly every day.

3. Let your bank do the mailing. Most banks offer free online bill pay: you type in who gets paid and how much, and the bank sends the payment. The check that goes out is the bank's, not yours, so your account number isn't riding around in an envelope. If you set up one recurring bill this way as a test, you'll likely move the rest.

One more free tool: the postal service offers a service called Informed Delivery that emails you pictures of the mail arriving that day. If something is scanned but never shows up, you know the same day.

Next Tuesday: the small charges hiding on your statement, and the 20-minute checkup that finds them.