How to Organize Your Credit and Gift Cards
How to organize all those plastic cards you have. Everywhere.
When I was young, kids collected baseball cards. Being a total geek, I never collected baseball cards, myself. My friends would all say, “But the cards have all these great statistics!” It never made much sense to me. Why in the world would you want pictures of baseballs on cards? And what kind of statistics? Unemployment statistics? Housing prices? It was a mystery. I collected Wacky Packages, instead. Wacky Packages are fun drawings of fake products that are take-offs on products, so instead of AJAX Cleanser, they would have AJERX. I loved them. I really loved them. (And I’m thrilled to know they’re back on the market!)
How to Organize Gift and Credit Cards
As an adult, I still have cards everywhere. They aren’t fun, brightly colored, humor cards, though. They’re cards that are a veritable altar to the gods of crass materialism. I have a Starbucks card, Barnes and Noble gift cards, frequent buyer cards from my local independent bookstore, credit cards that I use only rarely, and a Subway card where I rack up enough points to simply buy the franchise. I also have five car garage cards.
(To the tune of 12 days of Christmas:) four car rental membership cards, three hotel frequent visitor cards, two theater company cards, and an ACE hardware store buyer card. CARDS!!
The Best Way to Store Cards
Somehow, all those cards aren’t nearly as much fun as my Wacky Packs used to be. Adult cards are supposed to get us excited about buying stuff, about being an exclusive member (along with 743,809 other “exclusive” members), and about getting discounts galore everywhere (in return for deeply personal information about our buying habits that get sold to shadowy organizations for nefarious purposes). Unfortunately, we have to carry this entire stack of a gazillion cards with us if we want the benefits. As if! We don’t carry them all. We tuck them away. We tuck them in our desk drawer, on shelves, underneath stacks of mail, in filing cabinets, and pretty much anywhere a card might fit. Cards are small and thin. They fit lots of places.
If you want to get the most out of your cards, you need a system for storing them and getting them back when you need them. Reader Corey LaRue wrote in with a brilliant suggestion. Unlike me, he realized that all these high fallutin’ plastic cards are really no different from Wacky Packs or baseball cards. We were very organized when it came to our cards as kids. We can do the same as adults.
Use Trading Card Storage Pages to Organize Your Cards
First, you need the physical materials. If you’re on the super-cheap, buy yourself a cardboard Duo-Tang folder. You know the kind; you probably used them in fourth grade to turn in your reports. Duo-Tang was acquired years ago by Esselte, which has acquired almost every stationery manufacturer on the planet, and is no doubt itching for a fun, humorous, highly paid spokesperson who can teach Esselte customers how to “get it done” using Esselte products (I’m just sayin’). The Duo-Tangs we loved so much are now Esselte’s Oxford 2-pocket folder series 577. Buy one.
Next, get a bunch of clear plastic trading card storage pages. Just Google “trading card storage pages” for a gazillion brands. I use Avery Trading Card Pages 76016, which run about 35 cents apiece. Each page has nine clear plastic slots that are the perfect size for Baseball cards, which makes them ideal for two credit-card-size cards stored back-to-back. Now put all your cards neatly in the Trading Card pages, all bound inside your handy-dandy Oxford 2-pocket folder series 577 (really, Esselte, Duo-Tang was much easier to say).
You can also put tiny sticky pad pages on each card before you put it in a trading card slot. On the tiny piece of paper, write the amount of the gift card so you can know it at a glance as you browse your collection. For credit cards, you can write what they’re for (business, pleasure, going “off grid,” witness protection program, and so on).
Voila! Your cards are now neatly organized so you can flip through and see them all at a glance.
Group the Cards In Ways that Make Sense for You
Since each page holds only nine cards, and you probably have dozens of cards, be thoughtful about which cards you group together. What works best for you depends on your situation.
If you travel often, consider grouping your cards geographically. If you travel to New York, you would store your Metrocard, your Metropolitan Museum of Art membership card, your forged 30 Rock ID from back when you had that little crush on Tina Fey (before the restraining order), and so on all in one page. When you’re ready to travel to New York, just grab the cards from that page, or even take the page itself, and you’re on your way.
If you often shop by category, group all related gift cards in one place. I love books. I love them so much, I even wrote one (Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More. available for your favorite bookseller; buy one today). I have gift cards from every bookseller in existence, and those cards are all arranged on one page. When it’s time to shop for books, I grab my book discount cards and go shopping. I don’t love clothes, and I shop for them rarely, so all my department store credit cards and membership cards are on one page. Once a decade when I decide to go clothes shopping, I grab that page and spend a lovely weekend wandering around town, hitting all the clothing stores, and stocking up on fashion that will be out of style long before my next shopping trip.
If you use cards for different projects or clients, group them that way. If you drive to a certain project site, you might have a parking garage admit card, and a cafeteria account card, and a security card to open doors, and, of course, an ID badge, so the nice men in the security jackets know you’re supposed to be there. Without that ID badge, they might have to put on the rubber gloves. And you know how much we hate that.
Visit the transcript for today’s episode to see a picture of Corey’s gloriously organized card collection.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Resources
Wacky Packages — the official TOPPS Wacky Pack web site
Visit the Wacky Packages Website
— the unofficial Wacky Pack web site
Read the Get-It-Done Guy’s Tips on Organizing Gift Cards
— picture of Corey’s cards, neatly filed & Wacky Packages!
Credit Cards image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
