
The Ridge Wallet, holding nine cards, with eight bills in the billfold and my work / personal journal.
This is hopefully the final step in honing down my everyday carry.
When I first made my work / personal journal I included a wallet insert. My idea being that I’d carry the journal with me everywhere – because I needed my wallet with me. That worked fairly well and the complete thing would fit in my pants pocket. I ran with this set up for several months, and was, on the whole, quite happy with it. But it was big and heavy. It was also a pain having to take the whole lot when just popping out to buy some groceries.
I began to think about splitting my journal into a work journal and a personal journal with wallet. I tried that for about a month. I found that I neglected my personal journal, and carrying both when going out to customers was worse than carrying one big journal. So I started searching for minimalist wallets – which is where The Ridge Wallet comes in. It popped up as an advert on Facebook. Normally I ignore Facebook ads, but this was one I wanted to follow up on. I loved the look and design.
I did a lot of checking of reviews, and decided that this was the solution I’d been looking for. Before I bought it I did some final checks. I put my personal journal back in with my work journal, and I’ve kept the wallet insert in what will now be my hiking and backpacking journal. I dug out an old bi-fold wallet and checked how that worked out for a week. That went okay, so I went ahead and bought The Ridge Wallet. Now to see if it really does work as part of my everyday carry system.
Note: quick photograph taken on my desk. The monitor mounted lighting is making me lazy when it comes to taking pictures like this – just pull my monitor out until it is in the right place and take a picture.
Updates
- Journal: After a month’s use I removed the leather journal closure, as it kept getting caught on things and stopped the journal lying flat when I was writing. Maybe thinner, more flexible leather would have worked better.
- Journal: When I started going out backpacking again I decided to move my personal journal to a separate leather binder. I added a new notebook to my work journal which I use just for ‘Collections’ you’ll have to read up on how bullet journaling works to find out what collections are…
- Ridge Wallet: After nine month’s use, I am very happy with The Ridge wallet. I’m still slow getting cards out, but that’s because I don’t spend a lot of money!
- 2023, six years later and I’m still using it, and I’d buy another if I somehow lost this one!

Copyright © 2017 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.