The One About The Wallet

Many of you will agree with me that los­ing your wal­let is like los­ing half of your life. Well, it was like that was sev­eral years ago. After that, it was the filo­fax that made you feel you lost half of your life if you lost it. I remem­ber that story in the Ate­neo of Kris Aquino los­ing her filo­fax and (almost) every­one know­ing her show­biz secrets. Today, you feel like you lost half of your life when you lose your cell phone. Or your laptop.

I remem­ber back in high school, I lost a wal­let with my school ID, some pho­tos of friends, and some cards. I felt really bad, and par­a­lyzed for sev­eral days. And I didn’t even want to buy a new wal­let until I was absolutely sure that the old wal­let was really lost. Keep­ing infor­ma­tion might have evolved over the years, but los­ing your wal­let is still some­thing that makes you feel bad and mis­er­able and incon­ve­nienced for days.

So here are tips on what to do (1) before (to pre­pare you), and (2) after your wal­let is lost. This post is inspired by The Sim­ple Dollar’s post on The Dan­ger of Los­ing Your Wal­let. Tips 3–5 are from that post.

Tip #1: The first tip of course, is to try to find it. Remem­ber when you last had your wal­let. And retrace your steps in your mind. Doing so will help you elim­i­nate places where you could not have lost it, and con­cen­trate on places where you may have. What were you wear­ing? Where did you go? When did you take your wal­let out of your pocket? Use the power of your imag­i­na­tion to remember.

Tip #2: Assume the wal­let is stolen. If you can’t find the wal­let within a few hours, some­one else might, and you don’t know if that per­son will return it to you. When it comes to your iden­tity, credit cards, and bank accounts, you’re bet­ter off safe than sorry. The max­i­mum time you will want to wait is 24 hours as, for many com­pa­nies, there are dead­lines for report­ing lost cards.

Tip #3: You can take pre­ven­tive action right now to make the loss of a wal­let eas­ier. Just clean out your wal­let down to the bare min­i­mum, then pho­to­copy or scan both sides of every­thing in your wal­let. This will help you to eas­ily remem­ber every­thing that was mis­placed and eas­ily deal with the con­se­quences of card can­cel­la­tion and replace­ment. Weed out and update the con­tents of your wal­let. Get rid of those expired cards, old receipts and out-of-date dis­count coupons.

Tip #4: Carry min­i­mal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in your wal­let as a pre­ven­tive mea­sure. Try to avoid hav­ing your Social Secu­rity num­ber in there if at all pos­si­ble, as that will make iden­tity theft much eas­ier if you were to lose it. You’ll prob­a­bly have a driver’s license in there, but make sure that it doesn’t include your SSN and has only min­i­mal iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion on it. Think about it, is there any rea­son for you to carry your Social Secu­rity card in your wallet?

Tip #5: Keep your wal­let clean. The “Costanza wal­let,” over­stuffed with receipts and notes and junk, is a per­sonal secu­rity con­cern. Get rid of all of the junk you don’t use reg­u­larly — your wal­let is not your briefcase.

Tip #6: Write down the con­tact info for your health insurer, credit card com­pa­nies, bank and other impor­tant insti­tu­tions. That way, you’ll be able to get in touch with them right away and can­cel cards and get replace­ments if nec­es­sary. I have saved the info in my email account as a draft doc­u­ment so I can just access the infor­ma­tion via the inter­net when I need to and so I don’t have to keep a copy writ­ten some­where (which I will prob­a­bly lose also).

Tip #7: Don’t put all your eggs in one bas­ket. Don’t keep all your cash in your wal­let. Keep some at home in a safe place and only carry what you think you may need. This way, you reduce the amount of cash you may lose if you lose your wallet.

Tip #8: Peri­od­i­cally dur­ing the day, make sure you still have your wal­let. It takes only a sec­ond to do, and it gives you a bet­ter chance of find­ing your wal­let if you have just lost it. Get in the habit of check­ing reg­u­larly: every time you get up to go some­where, while you’re walk­ing, etc. A light touch of your back pocket or a quick look in your purse will give you this sense of secu­rity that your wal­let is still there.

Tip # 9: Keep just one credit card in your wal­let. So that if the wal­let gets lost, you only need to report one card miss­ing. Keep­ing one credit card also makes life gen­er­ally eas­ier for you — it keeps you from pay­ing so many yearly fees, and forces you to keep within your credit limit.

Tip # 10: Check your ATM and Credit Card state­ments to check if there are fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tions. This is where hav­ing online access to your bills come in handy since trans­ac­tions will be reflected almost instantaneously.