Buy a shredder. Shred pieces of paper with personal information on them before you bin them. If you don’t want to shred everything with your name and address on it then at the very least shred anything with bank account numbers, credit card numbers, medical insurance numbers, social security numbers and your date of birth.
If you can afford it, get a crosscut one. They make it much more difficult to reassemble your shredded documents. Gadget review site The Wirecutter has an exhaustively thorough review of shredders in which they talk to “a guy who made his living stealing other people’s discarded personal information” and they recommend the AmazonBasics 10- to 12-Sheet Cross-Cut Shredder. You can get it for £39.99 from Amazon.co.uk (price correct as of January 2017).
+ ‘Why You Need A Paper Shredder’, easyDNS