The “Where the Hell is My Wallet” Hack

Even the most vigilant among us will occasionally, say, leave our freaking wallets on the table at the restaurant because the kids were losing their minds and getting the hell out of quickly became priority numero uno. Hypothetically, of course.

Losing your wallet doesn’t just mean you’re out whatever dough was inside; you’re also about to make several lovely phone calls to credit card companies asking them to kindly cancel the crap out of your Visa Gold before some jackass decides to use it to fill up his gas tank and the gas tanks of his 20 closest friends.

Personally, I carry a pretty wide range of credit cards, all designated for various things (and all of which are paid down to zero each month, for those of you looking to cave my skull in with the “debt kills” pepper mill). Point being, I’m in for a long afternoon of phone calls if my pocket contents go missing somehow. For most of us, this process would look something like this:

• Quickly jot down which cards you had on you when the wallet went poof.
• Start dumping out filing cabinets looking for account numbers and contact information for the various card issuing banks you deal with.
• After finding the info for three of the seven cards you need, begin hollering at your spouse about how she always throws the damn statements away and what the hell is the number for Diner’s Club anyway.
• Find statement for Diner’s Club card at the bottom of Mr. Feathers’ cage.
• Claw out your own eyes in utter madness because apparently Bank of America switched you to paperless statements months ago and you’re a big fan of that Delete key.
• Head down to the local watering hole with your change bucket and ask for the cheapest bourbon they pour because it’s going to be a very long week.

Of course, there’s a more proactive approach to be taken with this kind of unfortunate scenario — one that you can do right now, while your wallet is still safely ruining your posture from beneath your butt cheeks. Let’s walk through the simple process together, because that’s what friends do.

1. Pull out each and every card that will need canceling or replacing if your wallet is lost: credit cards, driver license, insurance cards, video rental cards, membership warehouse cards. Put them all in a big stack on your desk.
2. Grab the top card and open a new [place to write stuff that won’t go anywhere —(cough)] and jot down the account number, expiration date, name of the bank, CVV value and the “in case of emergency” phone number on the back of the card. That last bit is the most important.
3. Repeat this process for all of your cards. If there’s no phone number on the card, search Google for “contact [issuing bank] lost card” and note the number.
4. If it’s not a bank card, note all of the important stuff: numbers that will identify you, specifically. Do the same Google dance to find the number you should call to report lost cards if such a number isn’t printed on the card itself.

I call this the “wallet inventory”. Both my wife and I have one and it lives in Evernote, so we both have access to it on our iPhones if things ever go south.

(Incidentally, if you’re using Evernote, it might be a good idea to encrypt the text in these notes so that nefarious characters can’t be all draining your bank account and whatnot if your iPad falls into the wrong hands.)

Even if you don’t use Evernote, stick this stuff somewhere. Dropbox might be another good place, or even your GMail account — anywhere you can get to it in a pinch.

But you should really be using Evernote for this. Just sayin’.

Photo by shareski