Your wallet or purse might be revealing your age without you even realizing it.
Family faces close by
Before smartphones placed thousands of photos in everyone’s pocket, your wallet was your mini photo album. Parents tucked children’s school photos inside. Grandparents proudly displayed the most recent photo of a grandchild. Couples sometimes carried a favorite picture of each other behind the clear plastic wallet protector.
Medication on schedule
Whether you’re on prescription medication or take daily vitamins, you might carry around a daily or weekly pill container so you don’t have to transport multiple bottles everywhere you go. They also help you keep track of what you’ve already taken if you’re having a busy day or traveling.
Of course, adults of any age use pill containers, but they become increasingly familiar as prescriptions become more complex in later years.
The list on a scrap of paper
That crumpled grocery list folded up in your purse might seem insanely outdated to someone who keeps track of everything on their phone. But papers have their own advantages too.
You can cross items off as you stroll down the aisles, squeeze last-minute additions in the margins, and you won’t get distracted by notifications mid-aisle.
The list may be on the back of an envelope, a previous grocery receipt, or scribbled on a notepad by the telephone. Forgetting something is easy, but jotting things down is still the easiest way for many folks over 50 to remember.
Bills for a rainy day
Even if you use a credit or debit card for all daily transactions, you might still keep a folded bill stashed in your wallet. This is emergency money.
The practice is leftover from days when you couldn’t count on every store to take a card or find an ATM when you needed one. Despite being able to pay with your phone nearly anywhere now, there’s still comfort in knowing you have literal cash stashed just in case everything goes haywire.
Collection of plastic
It’s easy to let your wallet swell far beyond necessity with grocery store loyalty cards, drugstore cards, department-store cards, membership cards, etc.
More stores these days allow customers to scan an app at checkout or just give their phone number, but many longtime patrons still carry the plastic version just in case. You may only visit some of these stores twice a year, but removing the cards can feel unsafe because that one time when you need it is when you’ll truly need it.
Ready for mailbox
Finding a small sheet or booklet of stamps secreted away in someone’s purse or pocket can tell you volumes about their snail-mail patterns. There are still those who send birthday cards, Christmas cards, thank-you notes, sympathy cards and good old-fashioned letters, and they know the aggravation of having an envelope all addressed with no stamp. Having a few tucked away takes care of that issue.
Jotted down numbers
If you look hard enough, you might spot a phone number jotted down on the back of a business card, a receipt, an appointment reminder, or just a tiny bit of paper.
It may be a plumber’s number, an old friend, a doctor’s office, or someone who wrote down your number years ago and never entered it anywhere else. Some of these scraps linger for decades because no one can quite remember if they might someday be helpful.
Health cards
Some seniors safeguard their health/insurance card like it’s a prized possession. Maybe their Medicare/insurance card is housed in a sleeve or only stored in one slot of their wallet so they can always locate it quickly.
Some even laminate important cards/documents to preserve them from decades of damage. Youngsters, on the other hand, just rely on digital passes stored on smartphones.
Coupons worth saving
Tucked away in a wallet, a paper coupon might sit for weeks, just waiting for the ideal grocery run. It might have been cut from the Sunday paper, tear-away flyer, or printed at the bottom of a shopper’s past purchase.
Online deals have eliminated most of this process, but many consumers like physical coupons in hand. For those who remember carefully searching over weekly newspaper ads and snipping out deals, the value of a few saved dollars is clear.
The backup key
For some, a wallet offers more than just financial storage; it provides a sense of security. There may be a spare house key in with the cards and ID. It could be buried at the bottom of a zippered pocket for decades, but the owner understands why it’s there.
Most people who have been locked out of their home once will never throw that little key away. A physical key never needs charging, remembering a password, Wi-Fi, or updating its software.
Names and numbers on paper
A small address book was an essential item in a well-organized purse. It had addresses and phone numbers of friends and family members, doctor’s offices, birthdays, and contact details of businesses used for years.
People moved or changed phone numbers, and old information was scribbled out and newcomers jammed in beside them until the little book chronicled years and years of relationships.
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