As of today (January 18), you have exactly four days to file a claim for compensation if your personal information was compromised in the massive Equifax data breach of 2017. All must be completed online or postmarked by the end of next Wednesday (January 22).

You can find out if you were affected by the Equifax data breach by scrolling down to "https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/にアクセスし、"Find out if your information was impacted. If you find that you were impacted, click to begin the claims process.

I say "begin the process" because the process is rather complicated; you can find a very detailed explanation of how to get what you can from the Equifax settlement here.

The bottom line is that you can only get a cash payment if you can prove that you had to deal with financial harm or other hassles directly related to the Equifax breach, or if you already subscribe to an identity theft protection service.

Depending on how much damage you have suffered, you could get up to $20,000, but the amount could be less if more people apply for cash compensation instead of taking advantage of the 10-year free identity protection offer.

There is a cap on the amount that can be paid per class of injury. This deadline passed in November.

The good news is that thanks to a final settlement of this huge class action lawsuit reached this past Monday (January 13) in federal court in Atlanta, the amount will be at least $380 million.

But you'll be fighting over that pile with the other 147 million U.S. residents who were compromised in the data breach. (A separate class action lawsuit has been filed in Ontario, but we don't know about legal action in other Canadian provinces or in the UK.)

The U.S. government has not yet decided on a class action lawsuit.

That is why we recommend that most people affected by the Equifax data breach opt for free credit monitoring services. You will receive four years of monitoring of your file at all three credit bureaus, paid for out of your settlement (but not capped), and an additional six years of one-view credit monitoring provided by Equifax on its own.

Ten years of comparable credit monitoring services would cost about $2,000. Of course, rather than pay that out of pocket, we recommend the best identity theft protection service available.