Whatever happened to the Long Lady Wallet? That long and lean financial accessory, proportioned for a checkbook, and fitted with an interior cash pocket and slots for perhaps a dozen credit cards. Maybe you recall your mother or grandmother or aunt wielding one at the grocery store checkout. Once upon a time, owning a Long Lady Wallet–or LLW, as I like to call it, or “continental wallet,” as it’s more officially named–seemed like an essential part of making transactions.. Now it’s all but defunct, a vestige of the non-digital economy. And a vestige, too, of an era when adultness was a bit more defined and refined.
Maybe I’m wondering if it’s time to revive the Long Lady Wallet. After all, it’s super-efficient to wave an iPhone at an ApplePay reader and–ping!–call it a day, but, in my experience, that same efficiency makes spending money freakishly easy, a little too frictionless as if I’m paying with seemingly virtual cash. I have trouble tracking my spending. Debit cards aren’t much better, in this regard. And half the time, I can’t even find my debit card: I go digging around my handbag, unearth my little card case streaked with leaked concealer and bloated with faded receipts, and realize I’ve left said card in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Perhaps this payment derangement is because purchasing things has lost all formality. There’s no ritual of opening up a wallet, getting your card out of its allotted slot, handing it over to be swiped by an actual human being, and, at the end of a focused transition of money for goods and services, putting it back where it belongs.
Two near-simultaneous events focused my thinking about the LLW. One was a harrowing credit card statement. (Ping! Ping! Ping! It adds up, as do interest charges.) The other was Balenciaga’s Spring 2024 collection that showed passport holders that were actually wallets, which perfectly housed a slim old-school style airplane ticket. Something about the contrast between my swipe-siphoned bank account and a wallet figuratively full of possibility made me recall the “Ring a Ding Ding” episode of Sex and the City where Carrie, broke, tries to apply for a loan; meanwhile, Samantha is showing off a beautiful quilted Chanel wallet. There’s an obvious distinction between a woman with a wallet, who is in control of her financial destiny, and another woman who considers her closet full of Manolos a savings account.
Resolved to become that woman in control of her economic destiny with some legal tender to spare, I bought a thin, obsidian Cartier wallet for $60 on a resale website. Beauty and brains, this LLW. It’s like a tiny library, with no-nonsense slots for a Dewey Decimal system of credit cards, a zipper pocket for loose coins, and two long pockets for cash or checks. Since using the wallet, I haven’t lost any debit or credit cards. I carry cash, which allows me to keep a rough account of how much I’m spending per day on sundries like coffee. My purchase of this Long Lady Wallet also had a halo effect over other parts of my financial life: I checked my credit card bills, deleted half-forgotten subscriptions, and called my accountant to prepare for the upcoming tax season. The LLW had become a harbinger of budgetary order.
I relayed this newfound faith in group chats with some of my equally financially shaky friends. They expressed a familiar sense of chaos around their purchasing habits, with one pal, who works in communications, noting that she has a messy wallet and because of that, often uses ApplePay. “I’m like why am I broke? Oh, I bought 10,000,000 salads for $15.”
An organized wallet permits us to be more intentional about our purchases, explains psychologist Matt Lundquist of Tribeca Therapy, who works in financial therapy. “In cognitive therapy, we talk about inserting pauses,” Lundquist says. “For example, if someone has a temper, we might work to help them slow down their response even by a few seconds. In that interval, there’s a chance for what we call secondary process thinking and behaviors to come online.” That secondary process of thinking Lundquist refers to is part of “executive function,” the skills we use to self-regulate, think ahead, and question if what we’re doing is really necessary.
Contactless payments rose 172 percent between 2019 and 2020, with usage surging thanks to our touch-free pandemic. According to Juniper Research, contactless payment transactions will grow to more than $10 trillion by 2027. That’s a lot of $5 lattes and $12 Sephora lip liners (to cite a couple of my recent ApplePay purchases). Increasingly, contactless payment is the norm; for teens, a debit card feels as out of touch as a landline. (In a September piece in the Financial Times, a 17 year-old wrote that he’d used a debit maybe twice in his whole life.) Society is moving in one direction—China is already virtually cashless—which means it’s up to us, as individuals, to tap the brakes on our discretionary spending.
The Long Lady Wallet may be the answer—at least for me. Lundquist notes that a physical reminder can help with making better decisions. “An organized wallet is a tool that is going to better support behaviors more aligned with what you want to accomplish in your life,” he says. A Long Lady Wallet is an elegant way to create a moment of pause as you effortlessly pull out exact change—trust me, your bank account will agree.