Nobody loses a wallet on the day they are being careful. It happens on day nine, in a train station, while you are tired and moving a bag with one hand and reading a sign in a language you do not have. You are not going to solve that with vigilance. You solve it by arranging things so that losing any one item is annoying rather than trip-ending.
That is the whole idea, and it is worth stating plainly because most advice on this subject is about hiding things better. Hiding is fine. Redundancy is what actually saves you, and it costs about twenty minutes to set up before you leave.
Split things that would hurt to lose together
The most common mistake is consolidation. Everything in one wallet, or everything in the one bag that never leaves your side — which sounds disciplined right up until the moment that bag is the thing that goes. Physical separation is the point: what you carry on you today should not be everything you own.
In practice that means one card and a working amount of cash in your pocket, and the second card, the spare cash and the passport somewhere else — in the room safe, in a different bag, in a jacket lining. If you are two people traveling together, split across both of you, which is the cheapest redundancy available and the one people most often forget to use.
A money belt worn under clothing works well as a safe and badly as a wallet. If you are pulling it out at every register, you have simply moved your wallet somewhere more awkward and advertised it while doing so. Put in it the things you hope not to touch until you check out.
Two cards, and not from the same place
Carrying a second card from the same bank protects you against loss but not against the more common problem, which is a bank deciding your spending looks unusual and locking the account at nine on a Saturday evening. Two cards from two different institutions, ideally on two different payment networks, covers both. Acceptance varies more than you'd expect once you are away from major cities, and a card that works everywhere at home can be quietly useless a few hundred miles away.
Some banks still want to be told you are traveling and some have long since stopped asking. Check what yours actually requires rather than assuming either way, and do it far enough ahead that you could still order a replacement card if you discover yours expires mid-trip.
Two habits are worth more than any product here. When a card terminal or an ATM offers to charge you in your home currency instead of the local one, choose the local one — that convenience conversion is set by the machine's operator, and it is generally a worse rate than your own bank would give you. And prefer ATMs attached to an actual bank branch over free-standing ones in tourist areas, which more often carry their own additional fee.
Copies that survive losing the thing you took them on
Photograph your passport data page. Then think about where that photograph lives, because a copy stored only on the phone that was in the stolen bag is not a copy. You want it in two places that fail independently: on the device, available offline, and in an account you could reach from a borrowed computer in a hotel lobby.
Do not photograph your cards. What you actually need is the last four digits and the number your bank publishes for calls from abroad, which is printed on the back of the card and is usually different from the domestic one. Write those down somewhere that is not a photo of a card, because a photo of a card is a card.
- Passport data page, plus any visa or permit pages that matter for this trip.
- The international contact number for each bank, and the last four digits of each card.
- Your travel insurance policy number and the assistance line — the emergency number, not the sales line, which is a different number and closed on weekends.
- Booking confirmations for the first night and the flight home. If everything else fails, those two get you to a bed and out of the country.
- A note of any prescription medication by its generic name rather than its brand name, since brands differ between countries and generic names generally don't.
The phone is the single point of failure now
It used to be that losing a phone meant losing a phone. Now it can mean losing the boarding passes, the train tickets, the banking apps, the hotel confirmations, the map with everything saved on it, and — worst of all — the app that generates the login codes for the accounts you would use to fix the rest.
The fix is unglamorous. Make sure your two-factor backup codes exist somewhere other than that phone. Know a couple of critical passwords by heart, rather than having every one of them sealed inside a manager that lives on the device you just lost. And make sure one person at home has your itinerary and can act on your behalf if it comes to that. A second, cheap phone is overkill for most trips; being able to log in from any device is not.
The order of operations when something goes missing
- Freeze the cards from the app if you can. It is nearly always faster than a phone call, and it is reversible if the wallet turns up in the other pocket.
- Write down what was actually in there while you still remember. This list gets vaguer by the hour and you will need it for any claim.
- File a police report if the item was stolen. It is often required to replace a passport and to make an insurance claim, and there is frequently a time limit — check what your own policy asks for.
- Contact your country's embassy or consulate about an emergency travel document if the passport is gone. What they can issue, how fast, and what it costs varies, so ask them rather than the internet.
- Call the insurer's assistance line before spending large sums on replacements, since many policies want to be told first and reimburse differently depending on that.
- Only then start replacing things. The urge to sort everything at once is strong and it is how people spend money the policy would have covered.
Most trips do not need any of this. That is exactly why it is worth setting up once and reusing, rather than reasoning it out on the day you are standing in a station with an empty pocket, trying to remember which bank issued which card.