Password managers: the only sane option

Nobody memorizes two hundred unique passwords, so without a manager people reuse three. One leak then opens everything. A password manager flips the economics: one strong master password (plus second factor) protects hundreds of random 20-character passwords you never type.

Setup that actually sticks: install the manager on phone and desktop, import the browser-saved passwords on day one, turn on the built-in breach monitor, and share family passwords through shared vaults instead of chat messages.

The one password that matters

The master password is the single point of failure, so make it a passphrase of five random words — memorable and brutally hard to brute-force. Write it on paper kept with your documents until it is muscle memory, then destroy the paper. Never reuse it anywhere, and never store it in the vault it protects.

Migrating without chaos

Do it in one sitting: install the apps, import browser passwords, then change the five most important accounts (mail, bank, cloud, code forge, social) to generated ones first. Everything else gets rotated as you log in over the following weeks. Two months later run the vault health report and finish the stragglers — a half-migrated vault quietly keeps the old reuse habit alive.