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For short trips to nearby places I sometimes prefer to take the bus. They aren’t in good shape but during some times of the day when they aren’t too crowded its faster than using the car.
“Yes, my coin pouch is inside my purse over there”
Wife's coin pouch.
I pick it up an notice how heavy it is, and the fist thing I see when opening it is a $20 and $10 bill.
“Hey, you’ve got a lot of money in here” I say half joking. 30 pesos isn’t much money, but its more than you’d expect to find in a coin pouch. Besides, the pouch is full of coins, most are those two color coins, worth $1 each.
“Its in case I get robbed. I’d just hand over that pouch, its heavy and feels like a good amount of money. If they open it they can see a few bucks, a good enough catch for most ordinary robbers”.
She’s pretty smart and it would in fact work that way.
The pouch is readily accessible so as to get over the incident in seconds, hand over the money fast. Heavy, a few bucks inside in case he checks.
My grandmother who has lived through a lot carries money in a similar manner.
Some guys have suggested having throw away “decoy” wallets: A few bucks, most 1$, and some cards you no longer use.
Sometimes, under some circumstances, even if you could defend yourself and maybe end up killing your attacker, its just not worth it. Forget about the scumbag’s life, I personally don’t care for it.
What I do is think about myself: As much as I wouldn’t care freeing the world from this piece of human trash, is it worth the problems, my time? Is it worth the thousands it would cost me worth of lawyers?
Not all situations are similar. A give away “fake” wallet, or coin pouch might be a good idea in some cases.
Edited to add: Another comment from my wife. She says she carries the mentioned coin pouch, of course her purse with her wallet, but the money she needs for buying whatever she’s shopping for or paying, she has that money loose in one of her jeans pockets, in case her purse gets snatched, or in case the coin pouch isn’t enough and the mugger takes her purse as well.
FerFAL
7 comments:
There was a self defense lecturer in the US who used to recommend something like this. His idea was to keep about $20 in $1 bills together. If you got mugged you were supposed to flourish the big-looking wad of bills, throw it on the ground in front of the mugger and run the other way. The idea was that the mugger would rather scurry around picking up bills instead of chase you.
I usually carry a stack of loose bills worth about USD15 in my hip pocket. The plan is to "accidently" drop them and run, with the thief having to make a decision to pursue me or pick up enough cash for a quick fix. Hopefully, the wind will scatter the bills requiring the thief to spend time chasing them down, allowing me to get closer to safety.
Suerte, ya'll!
why use REAL money?
in the dark and the confusion,
fakes/copies look good enough.
just like invalid credit cards,
or plastic that looks like them,
you could use "play" money or
laser-copied bills.
In my experience, color copiers are not able to reproduce paper currency, the photocopy has the shape of the bill- but it comes out black. I think they are programmed this way so that people cannot counterfeit them.
As far as copying some bills in order to carry fakes, you'd be amazed at what you can do with a decent scanner and a good color printer. Once printed, wad the bills up and then flatten them back out. Repeat that a few times and it begins to get the texture of real money.
If you do this, be 100% certain that you NEVER mix the fake bills with the real ones. If you accidentally use a fake and get busted, you'll be in a world of trouble, as in felony trouble.
Any attempt to photocopy or scan/print money is a federal crime. Don't even think about it. Use $1 bills - it's cheaper than 10 years in federal prison for counterfeiting.
+1 to what Bones said.
We're not talking about throwing a thousand bucks guys, just a few bills during an emergency. It will be money well spent if it gets you out of a problem fast.
It's also a serious crime, why risk it? To save less than 100 bucks?
And besides, call me crazy but I'd rather have some spare emergency cash (in case I need it !) in my pocket than having criminal evidence agaisnt me.
FerFAL
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