Zander Identity Theft Protection

Zander Pricing & Plans

When we tested Zander, we went with their Individual Essential Plan. That’s because we already pay for a VPN and antivirus software elsewhere. But, you can bundle it all together and it’s what Zander recommends because a VPN and antivirus software can help reduce your risk of falling victim to identity theft. Zander also includes more monitoring in their premium plan such as home title monitoring and transaction monitoring.

Beyond those two tiers of service, Zander offers both as an individual plan or family plan. With the family plan, they cover two adults and unlimited children. We think that’s a great deal considering it only costs five to ten dollars more per month. We’ll unpack the specifics in a moment.

Zander Insurance provided us with all of our identity alerts in a single dashboard.

You’ll pay less for Zander Insurance if you go with an annual plan. However, we think the monthly option is more flexible. When you cancel a service like Zander, your service technically stops at the end of your “pay period.” You won’t pay anything after you cancel, but you typically won’t get a pro-rated refund. That said, if you’re sure you’ll stick with Zander for the year, the annual plan is a deal starting at only $75 per year.

Zander Insurance Price Snapshot

Zander Plan Options and Comparisons

Now we’re going to go over the different Zander plan variations. Keep in mind that it’s the same plan whether you pay by the month or by the year. Regardless of whether you choose the Essential or Elite plan, upgrading to the family plan comes with the same extras as well. It raises the insurance coverage from $1 million to $2 million ($1 million for each adult) and it includes monitoring for unlimited children. Otherwise, the big differences come with whether you choose the Basic or Elite plan, so we’ll go over those differences here.

Essential Plan

We enjoyed Zander’s main capabilities with the Essential plan. Even as a basic service, Zander monitored our identity and alerted us to any problems. They didn’t offer us credit monitoring, but that doesn’t get added in the Elite plan either. As we explained in our review, we think Zander makes sense for its recovery features, not so much for credit monitoring. That’s why we went with the Essential plan since it includes the same amount of insurance as the Elite plan, up to $1 million for individuals and $2 million for families.

That’s a good amount of money, but note that it’s the industry standard nowadays. Most identity theft incidents don’t cost anything, as banks and credit cards catch them early.2 However, certain types of fraud can cost a whole lot. So we think it’s better to be safe than sorry. Zander would have also helped us recover our identity if it got stolen while we were subscribed to the Essential plan.

Who it’s best for: Budget-conscious buyers who want a safety net and don’t want to pay much in terms of monitoring.

We used the Zander Insurance Education Center to learn how to make the best use of our subscription.

Elite Plan

The Zander Elite plan adds more in-terms of identity theft prevention. They include additional types of monitoring such as home title monitoring, bank account monitoring, and transaction monitoring. That type of monitoring can identify early signs of identity theft. Once identified, Zander helped us take action based on the alerts we received to secure our identity.

They also include a VPN and antivirus software which can help keep your information secure. This is becoming more common in the identity theft protection industry. For instance, when we tested Aura, it provided us with a VPN and antivirus software regardless of which plan we chose.

Who it’s best for: Anyone looking to bundle their VPN and antivirus software with their identity theft protection, otherwise we recommend the Essential plan.

Your Best Deal on Zander Insurance Right Now

You can get identity theft coverage for less with Zander. Plans start out extremely affordable while still including up to $1 million insurance, and they get even cheaper when you pay annually. Just remember that the annual plan requires you to pay for a year up front. Also, keep an eye out for rolling deals and discounts on Zander throughout the year. For instance, many identity theft monitoring brands offer savings during the holidays (think Cyber Monday!).

The Overall Value Offered by Zander

From what we’ve seen, Zander is one of if not the cheapest options on the market today. But, we were a little disappointed that Zander doesn’t offer credit monitoring. It’s a basic feature we see in most other identity theft protection services. We could monitor our own credit by pulling weekly credit reports, but that’s a lot of work to save a few bucks. So really, it’s a trade-off.

Zander Insurance found out that our email address and phone number had been compromised in 2018.

As a budget option, we think that Zander offers pretty strong value. But that doesn’t mean we recommend skipping credit monitoring altogether. If you are looking for an affordable way to get credit monitoring along with Zander’s features, we suggest looking at plans from Identity Guard and IdentityForce. These are two of our perennial-favorite brands with comprehensive coverage. Or, sign up for Experian IdentityWorks free plan so you can at least get one-bureau credit monitoring. That was our favorite feature when we tested Experian IdentityWorks.

Note that some services leave out credit monitoring in their lowest-priced tiers, just like Zander does for all of its plans. That’s something we pointed out in our Identity Guard review. Other services include some credit monitoring in relatively cheap plans. We’ve used countless ID theft protection services, and IDnotify is one brand that offers the full suite of coverage with credit monitoring at affordable monthly prices.

All About Zander Insurance and Dave Ramsey

If you’ve heard of Zander Insurance before, it’s likely because you heard none other than Dave Ramsey talking it up. Dave Ramsey is an extremely popular personal finance expert with his own radio show and a whole library of books to his name. He endorses Zander Insurance, and his face is all over their website.

Zander Insurance is about more than just identity theft, though. It’s a huge insurance agency. You can get life insurance, car insurance, homeowner’s insurance, and all sorts of other policies from Zander Insurance. Dave Ramsey endorses the whole company, not just their identity theft offerings.

Recap: Is Zander a Good Identity Theft Protection Service?

There are a couple of approaches to protecting your identity. Some people believe monitoring and prevention tactics barely reduce your risk of identity theft while others look entirely to prevention tactics. Zander seems to lean more towards monitoring and prevention not working well since they focus their services on insurance for identity theft.

That said, we think Zander offers good value for the insurance they offer. And most of the identity theft prevention tools we think are more important you can find elsewhere. For instance, we recommend pairing Zander with a free credit monitoring service like IdentityWorks or manually monitoring your credit reports by pulling them weekly. If you’re up to putting in the work to prevent identity theft, Zander gives good value. We recommend more comprehensive coverage for most people though.

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