iPad/iMac Remote Processing and Security Question

This question is for those more versed in the iMac/iPad than I. we are attempting to spend more time in Florida during the winter. We’ve worked ourselves up to a month this coming Jan/Feb 2021.

I run our household finances off my desktop iMac, downloading transactions from my bank periodically for our debit car purchases and auto-scheduled monthly payments. This system works fine for us and I’ve basically be using it for over 10 years.

I’ve done some high-level research on being able to sign into the iMac from my wife’s iPad. It appears that if we both have the Chrome browser installed on my wife’s iPad and the iMac we can by using Chrome Remote Desktop.

My questions are:
1. Does this work?
2. Is there a better method?
3. How do I handle data transmission security? One place I will be at has an unsecure WIFI network that I know of.
4. What have I forgotten to ask?

Thanks in advance.

Unsecure WIFI is an absolute no-no unless you have a VPN.

Can you take the desktop with you or are you flying? I am assuming you will be in a condo or house not hotels.

David

Can't answer your question however we travel a couple months at a time 2 or 3 times a year and usually I only take my iPhone. I can pay bills, do bank stuff and do anything necessary with investments. I just wait till we get home to update spreadsheets.

Thanks John, I'm starting to research VPN now.
David, we're going to be in 3 different places and I don't want to lug a 27 inch iMac around - I was looking at a laptop for that very reason but it appears I can work with the iPad.
Richard, that's kind of what I do now, I figure the activity for the time period we'll be gone and enter the transactions, then clean up when I get back. I was looking for a way to keep things more current.
Thanks for the thoughts.

This reminds us how dependent we've become on web-based financial matters. As already said, who knows all the connections and hacks that may be on wi-fi as we travel.

Regarding VPN - be sure your banks, accounts, etc. *accept* VPN connections. You set up VPN on your local computer/whatever. But does the end point accept VPN connections? Many high-level security systems want to know you're the same person who connected a month ago from home, but block connections when the IP or other protocol is different.

Just my two bytes.
Tom M.

Ah, thank you gentlemen. If this get to be to much of a project(hassle?) I'll go back to the old way. It works.

Back in the 1998s I traveled for work to the same location for weeks on end. I would take my Amstrad desktop with me. It was an 8086 with 2 floppy drives which I upgraded to a Hard card with 30 Meg of memory.
There was no internet back then.

David

David, there was dial-up access in 1998, unless that's a typo. And newsgroups had been around for most of the decade, too. Commercial ISP's started to show up in the early 1990's, our first dial-up provider had a T-1 line piped into his garage (1992)! DOS and an Epson 8088 was put aside for a 286 machine. From one of the newsgroups, info about the WWWeb was posted, Win 3.1 was released in early '92 and the browser Mosaic came the next year. Took us several attempts (at HOURS of download time) to get it at 14.4 on a dial-up modem. Forte's Win-based newsreader "Agent" the year after that.

This box was an AMD K-6 one I'd built in '98, put a leather luggage handle on it and could stow it under the seat of commercial aircraft. Flew from TPA to PGH in late '98 with it and borrowed a monitor from a pal there. Got a one month dial-up account locally and had internet access. Red Hat Linux and Netscape browser.


The keyboard was a "bankers" compact one, wrapped it in bubble wrap inside the case for transport.

80286, Red Hat Linux and Netscape browser.

Gol' durn young'ns! Here's my 1982 Osborne, cp/m o/s and 5" display, came with WordStar, dBase, and SuperCalc. Even had the optional lightning fast 300 baud modem, which I used for gophering and ERIC while finishing my doctorate in 1987.