I’m in college and have been using the same signature since high school. I’ve already signed official documents with that signature, but I feel it’s too simple and easy to forge. Is it too late to change my signature?
Update: I am located in California.
Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated!
Yes, you can start signing papers differently. However, you may have problems with the agencies where you’ve already signed documents if they try to match your signature, so you’ll want to revisit those institutions and give them a new reference signature.
You can change it, but you might end up getting challenged a lot when your signature is the proof. At a minimum, you’ll want to update your bank accounts and the signature on your drivers license ASAP because your driver’s license is used as the signature checker for lots of institutions. In particular, notaries use it at times to authenticate their documents.
Are you really sure about this Avery
You can change it every day if you want. I’ve signed credit card slips with tic-tac-toe diagrams. A signature is just a mark meant to indicate approval or consent or agreement or…
There are a few areas where it should be consistent, though. The ones that come to mind are:
(i) if you use checks, you should sign those consistently and go to your bank to give them a new signature card.
(ii) if you’re a notary public, you need to be consistent about how you sign because the state needs to be able to look at a document and say “Yup, that’s his/her signature.”
There are probably other examples.
Hello, DavidNoah1. You can change it every day if you choose. I’ve signed credit card slips using tic-tac-toe diagrams.