Pimp Your Finances

One of my worst flaws is organization, especially when it comes to my wallet.

Yesterday, when I went to put another receipt away and couldn’t snap it shut, I was reminded of George’s wallet from Seinfeld.

George:  “Important things go in a case. You got a skull for your brain, a plastic sleeve for your comb, and a wallet for your money.”

[Jerry holds up George's wallet next to a hamburger]

Jerry:  “But look at this thing! It’s huge! You’ve got more cow here than here.”

George:  “I need everything in there!”

[Jerry looks through the wallet]

Jerry:  “Irish money?”

George:  “I might go there.”

Jerry:  “Show this card at any participating Orlando-area Exxon station…to get your free ‘Save the Tiger’ poster?”

George:  “All right, just gimme that.”

While my wallet isn’t quite that bad, it’s definitely full of crap I don’t need. To get an idea of how bad it is, I decided to take a full inventory.

Cards

Here’s all the various cards I have in my wallet at any given time:

• My driver’s license
• One checking/ATM card
• Nine credit cards, three of which are expired.
• Three loyalty cards for grocery stores
• Three frequent buyer card for restaurants I don’t go to, including two for the same place
• My college student ID (which I used this past weekend to get a 50% discount)
• Two health / insurance cards
• Four business cards
• A ticket to an old sporting event
• Three subway passes, one of which is empty, and another is de-magnetized
• Three other random cards which are expired, or I’ve never used before

The thing that sticks out to me is how many credit cards I carry. I don’t use them all. In fact, I only have a balance on two of them.

There’s no reason for me to carry around that many. Presumably, I carry them in case of an emergency.

But if I ever lost my wallet, I’d create a new emergency – not having any access to my cash or credit accounts. Also, I probably wouldn’t even know what cards I needed to cancel.

Receipts

This is embarrassing, but I have exactly 50 receipts in my wallet right now. That’s absurd!

As far as I can tell, none of the receipts need to be kept or filed for anything. I just told myself I would shred them later, and of course, never got around to it.

While this may just seem like a messy nuisance, it could also have serious consequences. Two of the receipts have my full credit card number on them. If I lost those receipts – even if I still have my wallet – I could fall victim to identity theft.

Also, having so many worthless receipts practically guarantees that I’ll lose or throw away the stuff I really need to keep.

Takeaway

I need to clean out my wallet!

Not only is it a pain to use, carry, or find anything in, but it’s putting my financial health at risk. Carrying nine credit cards – instead of say one or two – would only increase my exposure to identity theft if I ever lost my wallet.

Also, having so much crap in my wallet makes it hard to know what’s actually in there. There are probably receipts that I should have kept, but I threw out because I didn’t want to have to sort through a massive stack to find them.

There could be even worse consequences though. George’s wallet was so bad that he got a sore back. But that didn’t stop him.

He continued to stuff it so full that one day, it exploded in the street. He lost everything! The receipts, the chair, and the tiger poster.

I can’t let that happen to me.