Money stays in my wallet on my body. Period.
I am not ever going to stash cash where it can be separated from me by accident.
If there is any more hide away cash I can slip it into the waste band of my pants or the backside of my belt.
I have a cordura wallet with compartments so stuffing a few (5) twenties and a few extra coins into it is no problem.
A tooney, two looneys, four quarters and 5 dimes is the small change department. That adds up to $105.50 as emergency cash.
The spare paper money and ID should be in flat waterproof pouches just in case your wallet gets wet. The little flat pouches I use are the same as you see used for sample collection.

I like the 3x non-expiring giftcards idea. I'll have to remember that.

$1000 in small bills and a couple of ounces of gold and silver for the long term situation.

I remember on 9/11 that the ATM's did not work for several hours. What if it is several days or a couple of weeks?

The ATM's did not work in the immediate NY area. The ATM's and credit card processors in other parts of the country still worked fine. Even so, after this event, banks and the big credit card companies have invested millions of dollars in improving their infrastructure with multiple redundancy points and automatic load shifting of processing so that one large area interruption does not effect other areas.

If the banks are using redundant data back haul that feeds thru the same C.O. or even the same manhole in the street, it may still be killed out by damage to those structures. You would be surprised how many times I have seen major companies tout their redundant backup plans, only to have the fiber for each redundancy share a telco conduit underground.

This just got me to thinking of a past incident or two during my time with the LEC telephone company. I shall start a new thread.

My question to all is: Do you live in a single strand community?

Even with redundancy remember there was one bank that used Microsoft servers for their ATM database and was down due to a worm that infected all the database servers so there will always be something that wasn;t covered.

You are correct, there is no such thing as being prepared for all contingencies.
There are far too many variables and in the case of the Slammer worm attacks on Jan 25, 2003, this attack could of easily been preventable by ALL companies who were affected as Microsoft had a patch available for the vulnerability months before the attack.

This may be a bit anal, but I "portion control" my preparedness cash by vacuum packing it in increments of $200.
If I want to touch it for a particular situation, it is easier to justify borrowing a $200 packet from myself and easier to remember to replenish. Sort of like freezing the credit cards in a block of ice, you still need to find sizzors to open up a packet. I have gotten some strange looks when I can produce $200 shrink wrapped singles when the neighbors decide they want to play liars poker at 1AM.

In an emergency of the shelter-in or bug-out variety, or if there were simply a mass power outage, it would be priceless to not have to panic about two vital items: gas and cash.

So I keep my gas tank pretty full (a habit acquired post 9/11) and about $1k on hand (more if all the uncounted change were added up -- an item on the to-do list). In my mind, the $1k would be most critical for buying more fuel -- which probably would quickly experience price inflation.

Wealth has never been so precarious as in this digital age.

In a discussion over the banks melting down last fall, I confided to a friend that I had $1k on hand. She would not appear to be the survivalist type, at all, so I thought she might think me a bit extreme.

Then she replied that she had taken $10k out of the bank, just in case.

In a survival crisis, the greatest wealth is tangibles: water, food, shelter, fuel. But some cash could be handy.

$1,000. Minimum.