Making My Wallet Thinner

One of the unexpected lessons from the Virgin Festival this year was rediscovering how thin my wallet is when I take all of the shit out of it. (Related: there's a lot more room in the back of my car when I take all the shit out of that, too.)

It's regained a little bit more of its thickness since then, but one thing's that helped was consolidating my frequent buyer cards -- I'd gotten up to six (plus my gym card). Even using the smaller key tags (which I don't put on my keychain, which has enough stuff on it), they still take up a lot of room:

Wallet cruft. Like ephemera, except more annoying.

Now, a year or two ago, there was a Digg item about a card consolidation site (www.justoneclubcard.com), where you pick the stores you need from a drop-down and type in the account numbers, and it'll generate the barcodes on a printable, wallet-sized card. Pretty nifty.

At the time, it didn't support all the places I needed, though now it's pretty comprehensive. Of course, it doesn't have my gym, so I decided to make my own.

Not having an iPhone (and really, saving digital pictures of your club cards on your iPhone so you can run the on-screen image over the laser scanner seems kind of... perverse), I went lower-tech -- I threw the cards on my printer/scanner (you could also use a camera, carefully), adjusted them in Photoshop to print to twice the size of a business card, then folded the resulting paper in half to make a two-sided, wallet sized card:

Attention miscreants: The numbers are dummied up.

The sloppy lamination is just using those no-heat laminating stickers from any office supply store. And I saved the layered PSD file in case I need to make future changes.

Here's a closeup showing the difference in thickness (more or less):

I haven't had any problems with it so far.

Anyway, it's just a little silly wallet space-saver so I have more room for more fat wads of bills. And my way was kind of a pain -- if justoneclubcard.com has all the places you need, just do that, it's easier.

Then again, I suppose you can save even more space by going the functional tattoo route. But save that for the Google/SkyNet work camps.

Tags: club cards, loyalty cards, discount cards, frequent buyer cards