How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling

Posted: 11 Aug 2010 04:01 AM PDT

Costanza Wallet After our inaugural Financial Contingency Plan series post, How to Recover From a Lost Wallet, a lot of you suggested I write an addendum to the post to cover the case where you lose your wallet while traveling. Whenever you’re traveling, one of the biggest headaches you can run into, besides an airline losing your luggage, is losing your wallet or having it stolen. It’s happens more than you like and while we loathe to think about it, a little pre-planning can make your life a lot easier later on.

The first step is to do everything I suggested in the first post and then, when you travel, make these arrangements.

Slim Down

Clean out your wallet of anything you won’t need for your trip, such as receipts, pictures, and other extraneous pieces of paper. You probably have a lot of loyalty cards and credit cards that will have little value when you’re traveling, remove those from your wallet too and put them in a safe place. You want your wallet to be as slim as possible so that if you were to lose it, or have it stolen, you lose as little as possible. Now keep a record of what your slimmer wallet holds.

While you’re at it, photocopy, preferably in color, your entire passport. If you lose that, having a copy will at least prove you once held a passport… which is better than nothing at all.

Carry a Throwaway Wallet

This is a safety tip I read for traveling abroad – keep a giveaway/throwaway wallet that has some money and maybe an expired credit card. This gives thieves, or muggers, a “good enough” take that they’ll leave you alone if you produce it. If you are robbed, they can take your throwaway wallet and be happy with the heist. You get to keep your main stash, your health, and you live to fight another day. You should, of course, not spend much on this throwaway wallet and the best ones are ones you can make yourself.

Find a Way to Get Cash

If you do manage to lose your wallet and all of your cash, you’ll need access to money ASAP. You have a few options here, fortunately you can research them when you’re not freaking out about losing your wallet:

Hide a spare credit card: There’s no reason you should carry every credit you have, so keep one spare card hidden in your luggage or where you’re staying. If your wallet is stolen, even while using a throwaway, you still have one card that you can use for the rest of the trip. Just make sure it’s not associated with a card in your wallet or it may be deactivated when you report the fraud.
Cash advance from your credit cards: Even if you don’t have your cards, you should have the customer service numbers written down somewhere safe. Call them and you can usually get a cash advance, it’ll cost you, to tide you over until you can return home. Some credit card companies offer travel insurance to protect against this sort of thing and will wire you money free of charge (beyond the amount wired, of course).
Contact family and friends: The same people you are telling about your trip should be the ones you reach out to if you get in a jam. I recommend using the phone as it’s now common for hackers to break into Facebook and email accounts to scam people. The other day my “friend” emailed me to say he was mugged in London, even though he was happily at home. His “kids” (he has none) were OK though, thankfully.

Outside of these tips, losing a wallet while you’re traveling, especially abroad, isn’t much different than losing your wallet at home. With some preparation, you can reduce the impact of losing your wallet by slimming it down and you can reduce the impact of being mugged by using a throwaway travel wallet. Regardless of how much you prepare, it’s always very jarring to lose something so private but you can make recovery a little easier with some extra work up front!

Do you have any travel tips for your wallet?

(Photo: shareski)

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

AT&T Universal Rewards $50 Bonus

Posted: 10 Aug 2010 11:17 PM PDT

The AT&T Universal Savings and Rewards Card was my very first credit card. I applied for it in my first week on campus at Carnegie Mellon University because I was offered a t-shirt, not because I was some credit savant building my credit history and carving out a good credit score.

One of the great benefits of the card was some free long distance minutes, which was crucial back in the days when I didn’t have a cell phone and had to call home with my dorm room phone. Nowadays, the benefits of owning the card have vastly improved, with a nice $50 statement credit after you make a mere $50 in purchases within 3 months and rewards points you can spend in the ThankYou Rewards Network.

I like how the $50 bonus is a statement credit, not $50 worth of points you have to convert somewhere. Also, you can save up to $190 over 12 months on an AT&T phone because the card also offers 10% off on AT&T services and products. This includes paying for your bill with the card – so all you iPhone users out there you can get a quick 10% discount just by paying with this card.

Here are the other salient points of the offer:

$50 Statement Credit after you make $50 in eligible purchases within the first 3 months of becoming a cardmember*
Save up to 10% on eligible AT&T purchases for the first 12 months**
2 free directory assistance calls and 30 prepaid calling minutes per month
Zero liability on unauthorized purchases
No annual fee*

Apply!

AT&T Universal Rewards $50 Bonus from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering, Here you can watch How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering online. Recently it is the latest update serial play for the How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering.How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering is fully Eng Subbed, and avail in eng sub. Now it is availab le to watch online. you can watch How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering by the given links below, click on How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering Parts below to watch online. How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering Vidoe is source of Mega Video, Youtube etc, so you can watch How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering without any issue.

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering Part 1

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering Part 1

How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering Part 1

Tags: How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering watch online, full How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering video, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering download, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering torrent, free How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering megavideo, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering full, How to Deal with Losing Your Wallet While Traveling - Bargaineering eng sub

News INT.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010