Forever Stamp
Posted by Frugal on May 15th, 2007
For those who are mailing out letters this week, the postage for 1st class mail has gone up by 2 cents to 41 cents now. You can also buy the new Forever Stamp (see the picture below) to shield future stamp cost increase. They are meant to be “forever”, which means that you can use them no matter how much the postage has gone up.
Sounds like a good deal? I myself don’t plan to rush out to buy lots of forever stamps. Forever stamps don’t earn you interest. So it’s probably going to be an investment on par of inflation. On the other hand, because it doesn’t earn interest, your return is somewhat enhanced due to the lack of capital gain or income tax due to the earning from the interest.
So how do you think government can keep this forever stamp program going in case when the postage has gone up a lot? Easy. Just tax more and funnel the money into the US postal service. Either way, someone will need to pay for the cost of mail delivery. If you are not paying for it because of your “capital gain” from the forever stamps, the taxpayers will pay for it.
In any case, this forever stamp is certainly a good idea. Time saved from buying and pasting those 2 cent stamps can finally be put into productive use for other matters. But wait, I still have a whole bunch of 39 cent stamps and even some 37 cent stamps that need to be used.
In case you wonder (and I actually asked this at the postal office), the forever stamps can also be used at the face value of 41 cents even though it doesn’t say 41 cents on it. That’s how I usually used up my old stamps by putting several first class stamps for international mails.
More related posts:
Digg it Del.icio.us Reddit Furl BlinkList Newsvine Yahoo MyWeb
May 15th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Interesting post I found on Digg: http://www.productdose.com/article.php?article_id=5832
I guess it’s still convenient, though.
May 15th, 2007 at 10:27 am
I wrote a post about how the forever stamp compares to other inflation-protected securities… you’d be surprised how much the tax advantage works for you compared to T-Bills!
- Adam
May 15th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
This is a losing proposition. Stamps are dead. I mean, come on… how many stamps do you use in a year? for me, it’s much less than 12, and it’s decreasing every year.
May 16th, 2007 at 8:21 am
> So how do you think government can keep this forever stamp program going in case when the postage has gone up a lot? Easy. Just tax more and funnel the money into the US postal service. Either way, someone will need to pay for the cost of mail delivery. If you are not paying for it because of your “capital gain” from the forever stamps, the taxpayers will pay for it.
Huh? That’s a trivial time-cost-of-money transaction. So long as the USPS parks the funds and the rate of increase of the cost of mail delivery does not dramatically outpace inflation (which there isn’t really any reason to expect – it hasn’t until now, why would it start?), the forever stamps should be a net *source* of income for the USPS.
August 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I love the stock market ! I learned alot from the site !!! Thanks !!!