7 Easy Ways to Remember Passwords Without Forgetting Them

As time passes, cyber-crime is only becoming more prevalent – which is why it pays to invest at least a little bit of your time and energy in ensuring that you don’t become the victim of an online attack. There are a lot of neat little tricks users can use to simultaneously improve their online security and avoid the hassle of accidentally forgetting their passwords. Here are ten simple to use tricks available to any user who wishes dramatically increase the safety of their online presence.

How to Remember Your Passwords

1. Keep a hint sheet at hand. While it is vehemently recommended that you don’t write down all your passwords, in their entirety, on random bits of paper, where they can be seen by anyone. However, writing an obscure clue that only you would understand to refresh your memory if you forget your password is completely acceptable as long as you’re the only person likely to understand the tip.
2. It is a good idea to hide or disguise your passwords in places where they would not stick out like a sore thumb. Writing them on a sticky note on your monitor is definitely not a good strategy – however, sticking a numeric password in your phone book is.
3. Adding specific symbols in particular spots known only to you and purposefully misspelling words, as well as using acronyms and abbreviations are great little ‘code’ tricks you can use to make your password unique and harder to predict and thus- crack.
4. Don’t fall for the pitfall of thinking that just spelling “Asia” as “4514” will make your password significantly more secure. This sort of letter substitution is a common practice among users – and the crooks that design the cracking algorithms know that and have taken it into account when coding their bots.
5. If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s an interesting way to compose a difficult to crack a password. Try to come up with a sequence of words that is memorable only for you. Formulate a statement that means a lot to you - an inside joke or a dear childhood memory is a perfect example. Memorize that sentence by heart and use the first letter of every word and make that your password! This makes for both a great password, a hint that can’t be easily decoded, and one you can safely write anywhere! For example: ‘I used to laugh at the idea that my 6th-grade algebra teacher looked like a confused frog’. This can easily be transformed into “Iutlatitm6g#tllacf”. You can even recite the sentence in your mind as you type it to make sure that you get it right every time.
6. If you enjoy reading chances are that you know passages of some of your favorite books by heart. Simply pick up your favorite book, and try to apply the instructions above for a sentence or verse that particularly strikes your fancy. For instance, if you fancy the writings of George Orwell in 1984, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” can become “1984Wipfisiis”. If you’re a fan of Edgar Allan Poe “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—” could become “0uamdaipwawomaqacvofl”. Still, while those alphanumeric combinations may seem incomprehensible, it is advised that you choose the favorite parts of your works that you wish to incorporate into your passwords more carefully. If you take this route, it pays to make sure that it’s something more obscure than those simple examples we mentioned above.
7. Combining trivia about a subject that’s near and dear to your heart into a password also works remarkably well. For instance, if you’re a huge Beatles fan, you can make “YelSub1969yoahia-psssmpy” into a password. Perceptive readers will have immediately spotted that it is next to impossible to forget such a password, as it contains various bits of trivia related to the iconic Beatles album Yellow Submarine – an abbreviation of its name, its year of release and the first letters of all the songs contained on both sides of the tape. This makes for a long and difficult to crack password – and best of all, if you ever forget the letter sequence or the numbers you used, you can easily reverse-engineer it out of information that’s easily accessible online.

The methods described above can be applied to virtually anything, to make sure that you always remember your passwords. Just use a bit of imagination, and you are guaranteed to achieve instant results – and the good thing about this is that you’re using trivia you already know to do so, not new information that you need to remember and can easily forget.