How to remember your passwords

Remembering a password is difficult now a days. Gone are the days of only having to have upper case and lower case letters. Now they seem to want numbers, emojis, and the DNA of a unicorn… OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t seem by much.

So how do you remember passwords, when companies make it so they are difficult to remember?

Option one – just forget about it. It’s a nearly impossible task, especially if you are using different passwords on each site. The best option, and the one I recommend is using a password manager to help you with the job of remembering.

Option two – To avoid using the same passwords, create variations based upon the site, and a time stamp. Now, we also know that longer passwords are stronger, so we can incorporate several of these techniques. Such as you want Hope and Horses as your password, so for your Amazon site, you choose AmazonHope&Horses2019, Facebook gets FacebookHope&Horses2019, while your bank gets BankHope&Horses2019. Then next year you update it to be 2020.

Now, is that easy to hack… if they know your key system – then yes it could be. But it requires a person, not a randomized computer application to hack. So, will it be randomly guessed? Probably not. Does it make the weirdos that want letters, numbers, special characters, etc… happy – yeah, it actually does.

The big question is, is that what you want to do, or do you just want to use a password manager, especially for web accounts when it’s built into your browser…