I find myself coming back to the FBI’s cybercrime stats over and over, because they’re just mind-blowing. Over the last decade (2015-2025), annual losses to cybercrime for people age 60+ grew by an annualized rate of 39%.
For comparison, NVIDIA’s annual revenue also grew by 39% annualized from 2015-2025. And over that time NVIDIA went from being a company most people hadn’t heard of to being the largest or second largest company in the world. (It’s a tight race with Apple at the moment.)
So it’s safe to say that cybercrime is a growth industry in the US right now. (It has been growing rapidly with victims under age 60 as well, just not as rapidly.)
I’ve been writing about the topic here on the blog this year, corresponding with readers, and discussing the topic with clients. (I also picked up a few cybersecurity-related certifications along the way, so that I could speak and write about it more intelligently.)
And after learning more about it and discussing it with so many people, I’m pretty firmly convinced that cybersecurity should be considered another core area of personal finance — no different from insurance planning, for instance. To spend decades working, saving, and investing, only to then leave the proverbial doors wide open to would-be thieves makes no sense. (And, just like with dangerous gaps in insurance coverage, most people with dangerous cybersecurity gaps aren’t doing it intentionally.)
Within the personal finance realm though, most of what you’ll see written about cybersecurity and fraud prevention is essentially a) telling the reader to freeze their credit and b) descriptions of types of scams. To be clear, it is a good idea to freeze your credit. And it is valuable to be aware of the common types of scams. But the reality is that “don’t fall for scams” is not a sufficient cybersecurity policy. A policy that relies on always getting it right, every time, your whole life, is simply not good enough.
To that end, I’ve been working on a book (current working title: A CPA’s Guide to Cybersecurity: How to (Hopefully) Not Get Hacked or Lose Your Financial Accounts to Fraud).
It’s not finished yet, but it’s getting closer and closer. It’s at the stage where I could use the assistance of somebody who works in cybersecurity, who could serve as technical editor. If that’s something you’d be open to doing, please get in touch.
Update: thank you to everybody who got in touch! I have found multiple people to provide their expertise as technical editors.
Other Recommended Reading
- Go While You Still Can from Derek Hagen
- Retiree Spending Doesn’t Rise in Lockstep With Inflation, Blanchett Finds (Again) from Dinah Wisenberg Brin (Or here’s Blanchett’s article itself.)
- Should Retirees Fear another Lost Decade? from Amy Arnott
- Your Life Matters (Even If You’re Not Famous) from Darius Foroux
- The Quirky Roth IRA MAGI Rule and In-Plan Roth Conversions from Sean Mullaney
- The Cult of Equities from Ben Carlson
- Between Financial Independence and Retirement from Jim Dahle
- The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious from Will Oremus
- Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws from Brian Krebs
- The Seven Sins of Active Fund Management from Larry Swedroe
Thanks for reading!
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