Choosing and then remembering passwords for all the devices, accounts and cards that we have is one of the most challenging aspects of the new technology we live with today.

We’re bombarded with advice about what not to do.

Don’t use the same password for more than one device or account.

Don’t write your passwords down.

Don’t use your name or your date of birth, or that of a close family member.

It’s always easy to tell us what we shouldn’t do.

But what should we do? How should we set up passwords for our various devices and accounts? And how should we then store them so that they are secure but we can access them without having to click on the “forgotten your password” link every time you want to pay a bill or check your bank balance?

As well as avoiding your name and date of birth, it also makes sense to avoid passwords that contain your car registration number, your address, and any of this information backwards!

In fact, it’s a good idea to avoid any combination of letters that spells a word you can find in a dictionary, English or otherwise. Instead, use at least eight characters and choose a mixture of lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols. You could even make your password out of your favourite song.

Fergus Muirhead

So, for example, take a line from Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind: “How many roads must a man walk down,” and you have hmrmamwd as a password.

Alter lower and upper case and you get hmRmAmWd. Change the A for a 4 and you end up with hmRm4mWd.

The possibilities are almost endless. If you don’t trust your own abilities to create a strong password, you could use a password generator to create a random password.

Of course, their random nature means that they will not be memorable and will probably have to be written down somewhere if you ever want to use them again.

So if you do write them down, even though common sense says you shouldn’t, where should you keep them? There are lots of password manager apps – effectively digital vaults, where you can store all of your valuable information including passwords, but also perhaps credit card numbers, PINs and log-ins as well.

A simple search in the app store of your phone will give you access to the most popular.

If you are still concerned that someone could hack your phone and access all of your data then you might want to try to keep all of your passwords in an encrypted excel file on your desktop, hidden in a file that doesn’t say “Passwords”.

And it goes without saying that you should never share passwords, and you should always log out of accounts when you leave your machine.

This article was brought to you in association with Royal Bank of Scotland.

For more information on how you can keep your money safe from scams, visit