You know my opinion so let me pose a scenario for your consideration. A miscreant gets your password and goes browsing your various accounts to glean information — any information. Somewhere along the line they discover your bank, your credit card number, your social security number, your address, your telephone. A month or so later you receive a mortgage bill for the $500,000 house you just purchased in the Bahamas. You swear you did not buy it but it takes a court action and $10,000 in legal fees to get you out of the mess and the culprit gets a free luxury vacation in "your" house in the Bahamas.
On a smaller scale you get a bill from Acme Credit Card for $15,000 in charges made on a brand new credit card that was opened in your name. Or you go to book a room at your time-share only to find "you" have already used up all your credits for the year for a vacation someone else took.
Any security expert will tell you it is not a single big reveal that gets you it is the sum of dozens of tiny bits of information from a hundred sources that lead to the final big reveal. No matter how careful you are you leave crumbs of information about yourself when you cruise the web and using the same password everywhere simply makes the thief's job that much easier.
Do you lock your doors when you leave home? When you park your car, do you take the keys and put your belongings out of site or do you leave the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition? I'm guessing that you DO lock your doors when you leave home and you DON'T leave the car doors unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Those are pretty standard security precautions. Just like using secure passwords and not reusing passwords on the internet. It is annoying to keep up with but there are a number of excellent tools to make the task tolerable, it only takes a little self discipline to use them.
Profuse apologies for taking so long to respond; giving your post my thoughtful attention and consideration kinda got out of hand.
You'll be closer to my real financial exposure if you take 3 zeros from your numbers, but that only minimizes my risk; it doesn't negate it.
But a miscreant browsing my accounts, on the other hand, won't put me at risk, because NONE of the accounts for which I use my master password has ANY personal info other than my name, address, and phone number...PERIOD! Any account that's got any info that would leave me at risk if revealed is well protected. Also, I use close to 20 different email addresses and names as my login IDs, so a miscreant would need more than just my password. (Aside: I recently noticed that PayPal displays only the last two digits of my SSN as opposed to the traditional four.)
Leaving my front door open or my car unlocked with the key in the ignition would, indeed, put me at risk, and I"d never do either, but neither is analogous to what I'm doing, which is closer to leaving my shades up or my garage door open; yeah, you can see in, but that's where it ends.
Your caveats are certainly on the mark if you leave bits and pieces of yourself all over the internet, but I don't.
On the other hand, I can't begin to guess what info would be discovered were I to be
targeted, but that's so ridiculously unlikely that I can't be bothered to worry about it.
