I tend to acquire a lot of cards that are used infrequently but are still worth keeping around for those few times they might be useful. For example, old credit cards, library cards for cities I no longer live in, frequent flyer cards, store loyalty cards, etc. It doesn’t make sense to try to cram all these cards in my wallet and carry them everywhere. I prefer a slimmer wallet both for comfort and aesthetic reasons. Additionally, having cards in my wallet that I never use makes it harder to find the one’s that I use frequently. Finally, my wallet space is finite so I couldn’t cram all my cards in it even if I wanted to. I initially resorted to storing cards in drawers. However, cards were difficult to locate when I needed them. Then I thought of a simple but elegant solution: a credit card storage album.

You can make a credit card album for under $10 using only 2 items that can be easily purchased on-line: sports card sheets and a 3 ring binder. Simple steps are given below:

• Step 1: Open the 3 ring binder’s rings
• Step 2: Insert the card album sheets
• Step 3: Close the rings
• Step 4: (Optional) Label the spine of the binder with the words ‘Credit Card Album’

Each sports card sheet stores 9 cards. (18 cards if you don’t need to see both sides.) So 20 sheets will be more than enough for most people. Note: Make sure you get sports card sheets not business card sheets. Business card sheets hold 10 business cards but won’t work for credit cards which are larger than credit cards.

Why even keep the cards around?

Some might object to keeping rarely used cards around at all. To this I have two responses. Firstly, there are some cards that are unambiguously necessary to keep but are very rarely used – most notably a social security card. Secondly, the amount of space that this card album requires is minimal – no more than a medium sized book. In all but the smallest sparsest dwellings, this is insignificant.

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