If you are like me, you aren’t pleased when the price of stamps goes up. Here in my desk drawer, I still have about ten 34cent stamps, twenty 37cent stamps, and fifty 41cent stamps! None of those will be usable starting next week. I’ve been gradually using those 34cent stamps since 2001!
Fortunately, the Post Office has finally created the Forever Stamp – a stamp which will always be good for a first class stamp, regardless of rate increases. Needless to say, I marched myself over to usps.com and bought myself a 10year supply of stamps!
I estimate that I use about 50 stamps per year. I then looked up the historical prices of stamps, and projected postage through 2018. I then calculated the amount of money I’m going to save with these wonderful Forever stamps – (not to mention that I won’t have a drawer full of useless stamps). My savings – $28.80. Woo hoo! To those who don’t stock up – suckers! OK – I’m actually aware that if I put the $205 I just spent on postage into the bank at 3% interest in the end, I’d actually spend less money. But – that’s not the point! Think of the bragging rights when I bring out my 41cent stamp in 2018 to mail a letter!
Mike,
I have a small stock of these. Happily, online bill pay has reduced my outbound use of the post office to maybe twice a month.
One concern: I’ve read in the past (but having just tried to track down a citation, I failed, so take this with a grain of salt:) that you cannot use these forever stamps as a $0.41 “additional postage” stamp once postage goes up. That is, that they are valid for the first ounce of a first class letter. No good for additional weight, no good for flats, etc. But like I said I can’t find a citation for that.
The reason I worry about this is that a substantial portion of my outbound mail is flats.
Jeff
Well, your old stamps aren’t actually “useless.”
You just have to go through the painful process of buying the “make-up” 1c, 2c, 10c stamps to get to the now 42 cent mailing price.
But I know, who wants to do that?
Actually, you should see how many stamps you could use to actually come up with 42 cents on one letter.
I use about 100 stamps per year, so I like to buy rolls of 100. Unfortunately, they don’t sell Forever stamps in rolls of 100. And the recent tendency has been for the post office to increase the rate twice a year. (With virtually no notice! The only reason I knew the rates were going up today was from an advertisement on an ATM.)
I’m still using up my $0.39 + $0.02 combos.
The stamps-by-mail order form I have doesn’t sell conversion stamps, so I tried to order some online this weekend. But every time I went to usps.gov, it said the online store was unavailable.
I still prefer stamps-by-mail to the online store. Aside from being always available, it’s faster. I’ve often received stamps THE SAME DAY, because the letter carrier sometimes opens it up right at the mailbox and will process the request on the spot.