I had lunch with my friend Matt last week. Matt runs the popular community blog Metafilter, where the seeds of Get Rich Slowly were sown. As we ate our pre-Christmas tamales, we chatted about our respective websites. I mentioned that Charlie Park, who runs PearBudget, is acting as a technical reviewer for Your Money: The Missing Manual.

“You know,” I said. “Charlie and I both launched our projects at about the same time. And we were both active members of Metafilter before doing this.”

“I know,” Matt said. “Have you seen his new project? It’s called Wallet Garden. It’s awesome.”

“What does it do?” I asked.

“All it does is store phone numbers.” I must have looked perplexed because he fished out his wallet to explain. “See here on the back of my credit card? There’s a number to call if the credit card is lost or stolen. But think about that for a minute. If my credit card is lost or stolen, how do I know what number to call? It’s a sort of paradox or something.”

“So what does Charlie’s site do?” I asked.

“Well, it lets you enter these phone numbers. Or other phone numbers. It doesn’t keep any other info like your credit card numbers or anything. You just give each phone number a label, put in the phone number, and that’s it. Like, I might type in American Express and then put this contact phone number.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Matt said, “but it’s awesome. It’s so brain-dead simple, but it’s also so useful. I’m surprised you haven’t posted this on Get Rich Slowly yet. You really should. In fact, you should do it on New Years Day.”

“I can’t do it on the first,” I said, “but I can post it the following week. Wallet Garden, huh? I’ll have to give it a try.”

So there you go. Wallet Garden is a free, easy-to-use web app that does just one thing: It protects you from ID theft by cataloging the customer service numbers for your credit cards. If something happens, you have quick and easy access to the info.

This article is about Money Hacks, Tools  Tuesday, 5th January 2010 (by J.D. Roth)