What your wallet says about you - Spending - wallet styles and contents
Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine

While demolishing he old Apollo Theater near Times Square in New York City a couple of years ago, workers made a discovery that, in its own way, was as critical to interpreting the civilization of its day as the Rosetta Stone. Between 1959 and 1961 thieves had apparently been stealing theatergoers' wallets, stripping them of cash and ditching them in an air shaft. The discarded wallets recovered by the workers were remarkably thin.

Cut to an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza tries to cram a slip of paper the size of a fortune-cookie fortune into his corpulent wallet. Strained past the breaking point, the wallet explodes all over a busy street, blowing its contents like ticker-tape confetti.

It's a paradox of modern times that as more transactions can be handled electronically, using neither cash nor paper nor plastic, our wallets are bulging with all three. Like a modern version of the clunky chatelaine--an ornamental clasp that women once wore around their waists, to which they attached knives, keys, scissors and other household goods--our wallets are crammed full of credit cards, debit cards, ID cards, frequent-buyer cards, frequent--buyer cards--and the receipts that go with them--not to mention pictures of the kids and the dog. Increasingly, they hold our financial and personal identities; they are leather mirrors of ourselves. Or, as Costanza observed of his wallet, "This is an organizer, a secretary and a friend."

And, as in our choice of friends, there's no accounting for taste and personal style. Mike Ellmann, a stock analyst with Schroder & Co., carries a no-nonsense black bifold wallet. But while his cash compartment is divided into two sections, he puts all his bills and receipts in one section, reserving the other side for a single "cheesy trinket"--a metal Japanese good-luck charm in the shape of a stork and tortoise, wrapped in clear plastic. It was given to him by a friend after Ellmann was in an auto accident.