There’s a sticky note under almost every keyboard I work on in Portage County.
Some of them have just a couple passwords on them. Most have eight or ten. The newest one I saw — at a client’s house in Kent — was a little spiral notebook with 60 pages of crossed-out and rewritten passwords going back to 2014. She apologized for it like she’d done something wrong.
She didn’t do anything wrong. The system is broken. Asking a person to remember 50 strong, unique passwords is like asking them to memorize 50 phone numbers from 50 different decades. Nobody can do it.
The fix is a password manager. I’m Bill Davis, I run Bill’s Home Tech in Atwater, and I’ve been recommending these to clients for over a decade. Let me explain what they are and why I think every person reading this should have one.
The simplest possible explanation
A password manager is a small, locked filing cabinet that lives inside your computer or phone.
You put all your passwords in it. The cabinet itself has one password — the master password — which is the only one you have to remember.
When you go to a website that needs a password, the cabinet opens itself, hands the right password to the website, and locks itself again. You don’t type anything.
That’s it. That’s the whole concept.
It’s not new. It’s not weird. It’s been around since the early 2000s. It’s what every IT person in the world uses for their own passwords. It just hasn’t really caught on with regular folks because nobody explained it well.
Why this is better than a sticky note
A sticky note has a few problems:
- A burglar walks past your desk and now has the keys to your bank.
- You can only have one sticky note. So you reuse the same password on 30 sites — and when one of those 30 sites gets hacked (it happens to one of them every couple weeks), the bad guys try that password on every other site you might use. Your bank. Your email. Your Amazon.
- You can’t read your own handwriting from 2018.
A password manager fixes all three. The “sticky note” lives behind a master password and bank-level encryption. Nobody walks by and reads it. And because typing the password is now done for you, you don’t care if it’s “f3RT9!klmZ@” — you only have to remember the master password.
“But what if I forget the master password?”
Real concern. Here’s how I handle it for clients:
- Write the master password on an index card. Put the card somewhere only you’d think of — taped to the back of a framed family photo, inside a specific cookbook on page 47, etc. Not on the desk, not under the keyboard.
- Tell one trusted family member where the card is. (Not what’s on it — where it is.)
If something happens to you, that family member can find the card. If you forget it next Tuesday, you go look at the card.
This is, by the way, exactly what I do with my own master password. Mine’s taped inside the cover of a Ohio State football yearbook on the bookshelf. My wife knows where it is. That’s the whole succession plan.
Which password manager should you use?
There are about a dozen of these and the differences between them are minor. The two I recommend in 99% of cases:
1Password — $2.99/month per person, $4.99/month for a family of up to 5
This is what I use personally and what I install for most senior clients in Portage County. The reasons:
- It’s been around forever (since 2006). Solid track record.
- The app is easy on the eyes — bigger text, less clutter than the others.
- The setup walks you through importing your old passwords from your browser.
- The “Watchtower” feature flags any password that’s weak or has been leaked in a hack — like a quiet check engine light for your security.
The family plan is the right move if you’ve got an adult kid involved in helping. They get their own vault, you get yours. You can also share specific passwords with them — like the Wi-Fi password — without sharing your bank login.
Bitwarden — Free for the basic version
If you’re allergic to subscription fees, Bitwarden’s free version does almost everything 1Password’s paid version does. The interface isn’t quite as friendly, but it’s perfectly usable. Their paid version is $10/year, which is cheaper than two cups of coffee.
I install Bitwarden for clients who don’t want a subscription, or who already have a strong “I refuse to pay for software” stance. Both are fine.
Avoid: LastPass (had multiple serious breaches in 2022-2023; I don’t trust them anymore), and any password manager that came pre-installed on your phone or browser by default. The browser-built-in ones (Chrome’s, Edge’s) are better than nothing but not as secure or easy to manage.
How to actually get started
This is the part where most people stop reading. Don’t.
Day 1: Install it.
Sign up at 1password.com or bitwarden.com. Pick a master password (more on that below). Install the app on your phone and the browser extension on your computer.
Day 2-7: As you use websites, save passwords.
Don’t try to import everything at once. Just live your normal life. Every time you log in to a site, the password manager will pop up and say “save this?” Click yes. After a week of normal life, your top 20 passwords will be in there — which is most of what you actually use.
Week 2: Change the dangerous ones.
Open your password manager. It’ll show you which passwords are weak or duplicated across sites. Start with these in this order:
- Email — this is the master key, because every other password can be reset via email.
- Bank
- Amazon
- Anything else with your credit card stored
For each, the password manager has a “generate password” button. Click it. Copy the new password. Paste it into the website’s “change password” form. Save it back to the manager. Done. The new password lives in your vault — you’ll never have to type it again.
The master password — pick something memorable but weird
Don’t use: - Your dog’s name - Your wife’s birthday - Anything from a sticky note
Do use:
- A short sentence you’ll remember. “My grandson Henry was born in Atwater 2019” is a great master password — it’s long, it’s personal, it’s not in any dictionary, and you’ll remember it forever.
- Or three random words and a number: “PorchSwingTomato47” is harder for a computer to crack than H7@$%xqp9.
Length beats complexity. A 20-character sentence is harder to crack than an 8-character mess of symbols.
Want me to set this up for you?
Honestly, password managers are one of the highest-impact things I install. Twenty minutes of setup, and the household never has another sticky-note crisis.
I do this on most senior visits in Portage County. Part of the $99 flat-rate visit. I’ll bring a copy of 1Password with me, install it on whatever devices you use, walk you through setting up your master password (and writing it on the index card), and import the obvious passwords as I find them.
Call (330) 200-8042 or book at billshometech.com.
What changes when you have one
I’ll tell you what changed for my mom Joanne when I set hers up about three years ago:
- She used to call me about once a month with “Bill, I forgot the password to my email/bank/the photo site/Amazon/Etsy.” That’s gone.
- She used to use the same password (her husband’s nickname plus a number) on everything. Now every site has a unique 20-character password, and she doesn’t know any of them — and that’s fine, because she doesn’t need to.
- When her bank emailed her about a “compromised password” event a year and a half ago, the password manager generated her a new one in about 4 seconds. Total time invested: less than a minute. No anxiety, no rush, no calling Bill.
It’s one of the very few pieces of technology where the answer to “is this worth it?” is so obvious that I’ve never had a client install one and tell me, six months later, that they regret it.
You don’t need to remember 47 passwords. You need to remember one. Pick a good one. Write it on an index card. Put it in a cookbook. The rest takes care of itself.