Nashua inventor and Vietnam War veteran John Higgins considers himself a simple guy.

He also calls himself a wallet utilization expert.

Put the two together and you’ll understand Higgins’ latest concept: the EZ-OUT Credit Card Remover, an uncomplicated, 2-inch tab of plastic that provides a two-step aid for anyone with a wallet.

Inserted into a wallet compartment, the EZ-OUT tab helps users immediately spot their frequently used credit cards hidden among rows of other plastics, then it allows faster, easier removal of the card with a tug of the tab.

“It’s like having a micro-billboard right in your wallet,” Higgins said. “You open your wallet, and let’s say there’s a picture of the American Express credit card on the tab. That’s the only thing in your wallet with advertising, so you get fixed right to it.”

He likened the tool to the quick location and removal of an important folder in a filing cabinet.

The light bulb went off for Higgins, 64, when he and his wife were registering to vote in their new neighborhood in Nashua last year. His wife had difficulty sliding her driver’s license out of its clear plastic case in her wallet. She ended up just flashing it from inside the wallet at the registration attendant.

“I went home and thought about it and came up with this new product,” Higgins said. “I took a pair of tweezers, I got her license out of the license compartment, and put the first EZ-OUT card remover in. It came out so clean, so easy, I go, ‘My God.’

“I decided to be able to market it, it had to be sold to credit card companies. Credit card companies would be able to give it as a promotional item with every new credit card they send out, and they could put any graphics, logos, mottoes or sayings right on it and give it right out in the same envelope as the credit card at no extra cost.”

Higgins aims at selling the product for about 15 cents apiece to top banking and credit card companies around the world, including Capital One, American Express and Bank of Mexico in Mexico City. Each company would likely log millions of orders to distribute the EZ-OUT with the millions of credit cards they mail out on a daily basis, Higgins said.

“The credit card that is the most accessible and easiest to remove will be the credit card most used,” Higgins said.

“If your customer has the EZ-OUT Credit Card Remover, and it’s in that pouch, you own that pouch. That becomes that credit card’s exclusive pouch. It’s like renting that space,” Higgins said.

“People with arthritis, people that need reading glasses, if you opened my wallet, immediately you’d see that tab, and you’d want to grab that tab because all the other credit cards are almost below the credit card compartment line. You don’t even want to take another credit card out because it’s a pain in the neck.”

The EZ-OUT, to be printed and manufactured at Accurate Printing in Nashua, will become available pending the product’s patent, a process that is underway, Higgins said. He is hopeful that he will receive the patent in about nine months.

“There’s nothing else like it out there,” Higgins said.

Once he receives the patent, the EZ-OUT will add to Higgins’ growing inventory of wallet inventions, which already includes the Re-Pillable Card, a wallet pill box used to store emergency aspirins and other medications.

Higgins has sold more than a million Re-Pillables since its debut in 2004. It was also awarded the best new health/medical/personal care/safety invention by the Yankee Invention Exposition in 2005.

“I sold a million and a half Re-Pillable Cards so far,” Higgins said. “It didn’t make me a millionaire, but it paid all the bills and got me into a new home.”

Higgins anticipates his EZ-OUT invention will find even greater success.

“This one, if I sell one, I’m going to sell 50 to 100 million because if one credit card company orders, they have to order millions,” Higgins said. “Then they will all order because they will all hear about it and it will be a frenzy. They’ll all have to offer this so they can stake their claim for their credit card in the wallet.”

Not bad for some simple ideas to monopolize wallet space.

“I’m the little guy,” Higgins laughed. “I’m just the average Joe that beats the big guys. I just think simple.”

“I know all about the interior of a wallet; it’s sort of my thing. … You see people on ‘America’s Got Talent,’ and they juggle or you go, ‘What? How could they become experts at that?’ I wanted to carry lifesaving aspirin and other pills in my wallet and I looked at one – and now it’s become part of my life. I fixate on it.”

Higgins, a disabled Vietnam War veteran who operated his own printing press for 25 years after serving in the military, has since retired and shares his inventions business with his wife.

“I’m very creative minded,” Higgins said. “My disabilities don’t allow me to work, but whatever my abilities are, I sit and ponder, ‘How do I fix that? How do I do that? How do you carry pills in your wallet?’ I’ve become very creative, but I could not necessarily hold down an eight-hour-a-day job anymore. We all do what we can with the handicaps that we have.”

If his EZ-OUT invention fares well in the credit card industry, Higgins said his next target would be places like AARP, supermarket chains, or military and veterans associations that issue membership cards people need on a regular basis.

Higgins himself uses six EZ-OUT tabs for his own arsenal of cards, ranging from IDs to credit cards to his veterans card.

“I go to the store and use it, and show people at the cash register,” Higgins said. “They’re amazed. They go, ‘That is unbelievable that you can take it out like that.’”

Maryalice Gill can be reached at 594-6490 or mgill@nashuatelegraph.com.