Dear fellow men:

In case you have not already realized it, women are checking out your ass. And, frankly, if your wallet is so overstuffed as to appear that you’ve developed a large, cancerous ass-cheek growth, you’re probably not helping your cause.

So, if you’re looking for love, or simply looking to not be labeled ‘ass-cheek growth guy’ by the group of cute girls at the end of the bar, it might be time to slim down your billfold.

Thus convinced, start the process by examining the wallet itself. If it is made from cordura (or, really, anything other than leather), you will not have even the vaguest of chances of sleeping with any woman who sees you remove it from your pocket. (In fact, this applies even if the woman in question is a member of PETA; I am fairly certain there’s a special exemption to their animal cruelty platform that allows the purchase of leather wallets to keep guys from looking like complete doofuses.)

Also, if you have a crappy five-dollar wallet, every single woman who sees it will instantly know it’s a crappy five-dollar wallet. Women spend huge percentages of their adult lives idly searching for the perfect purse and handbag, across thousands upon thousands of stores. They have examined more leather goods in a single afternoon than you have in your entire life. They know the difference. Your five-dollar wallet isn’t fooling anyone but yourself.

Additionally, if your wallet is tri-fold, multi-fold, or in any way resembles an origami project, trade it in for a plain old fashioned one that simply folds in half once. Obviously, the more you fold something, the thicker it becomes, and some wallets are a good inch and a half deep even before you start filling them up. If you’re still at a loss, just buy this, which I’ve owned for the last eight years. Thanks to, as you’re about to learn, not overstuffing, it still looks new.

Onto what goes into the wallet. To gauge where you stand, remove everything from you wallet, and make four piles: one for money, one for credit cards / id / etc., one for receipts, and one for anything else. These piles are likely rather unwieldy, which is exactly the problem. The goal here is to put as little of what’s in those piles back into the wallet.

Start with the money. That’s the one thing that incontrovertibly belongs in your wallet. Everything else should be subjected to close scrutiny.

Next work your way through the card pile. From it, place in your wallet: your drivers license, your atm card, one or two credit cards, your metrocard (if you are a New Yorker), four of your business cards, and your health insurance card. That’s it. Put everything else in your desk drawer. Seriously.

You simply cannot afford to stuff you wallet full of things you don’t truly need. You don’t, for instance, need to carry twelve different credit cards all at the same time. At most, you need one for personal expenses and one for business expenses. If you’re worried about maxing out your limit (which, frankly, you probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place) you can swap the nearly maxed card for another unused one from your desk drawer as necessary.

You also don’t need things like your Blockbuster card or your museum membership cards; if they can find you in their computer system given your ID, you shouldn’t be schlepping their plastic around. Even if your grocery store doesn’t allow you to key in your phone number for rewards club savings, say, you still likely don’t need to take your grocery rewards card with you everywhere. If you’re just ‘stopping by’ the grocery store, you’re unlikely to buy much; when you head out for a big shopping run, you take the card out of your desk. The rest of the time, you leave the card, and most others, at home.

Now the receipts. Take all of them, put them in a file somewhere, and never, ever again put a receipt into your wallet. Put new ones in your front pocket, then add them to the file when you get home. Receipts are the single largest cause for outlandishly overstuffed wallets. And there is absolutely, positively no reason for carrying those receipts around. Most guys have returned perhaps two items in the past five years. When return number three rolls around, you can damn well pull the relevant slip from the file. The rest of the time, the receipts add bulk, look stupid, fall out everywhere, and generally detract from good wallet housekeeping.

Now the miscellaneous pile. If it doesn’t already include it, take a single check, a $20 bill and a $100 bill, and fold them together. Place this in one of the inside pockets of the wallet. This is ’emergency’ money, or, more to the point, ‘cover dinner after your credit card is declined so that you and your date don’t end up in the kitchen washing dishes’ money. Not much else from the miscellaneous pile should be added back into your wallet either. If you want to carry pictures, limit yourself to one of your significant other, and one each of any children you have (and know about). Nobody wants to see even the first photo, so please don’t torture them with a stack.

That’s it. Keeping your wallet organized is easy: aside from cash, and replenishing your stack of business cards, do not put anything new into your wallet. Try it for a few weeks. Then head back to the bar where the cute girls secretly taunted you for your unwieldy buttock-bulge, observe the newfound respect your svelte wallet and resulting slim line engenders, and ask the cutest for her phone number.

And, even then, place the phone in your pocket. Not in your wallet.