Archive for July, 2010

I’d known about Forever Stamps for perhaps three years but was wary of buying them. You buy a stamp at today’s first class rate and it’s good forever, no matter how high the first class rate goes. At first glance, a great hedge against one of life’s certainties — postal rate increases. It’s like death and taxes. Right? Since 1958, the frequency of rate increases has gone from five years down to less than two years (1958 was the first increase in 26 years, the current 44-cent rate will have been in effect for a mere 20 months). The typical increase used to be a penny, now it’s two cents. Given the increases in both the frequency and amounts, Forever Stamps could be one of the greatest inflation hedges since common stocks and home ownership. And even us disabled, retired guys have better things to do than counting stamps, buying smaller value stamps and sticking two or more stamps on every letter to use up our pre-increase stamp supply. Nevertheless, my brilliant analysis seemed to put Forever Stamps into the category of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” After all, for the inflation hedge to work you’d need to buy enough stamps to last through some number of rate increases. Let’s be real, who would go out and buy a supply of more than one year’s worth of stamps? Only some wacko would go out and do something like that just to beat some hypothetical future rate increase imposed by an agency that some people, many of whom are decidedly not wackos, think is going to disappear. Yes, I am that crazy And so, on May 1, 2008, 12 days before first class rates increased to 42 cents from 41 for the first ounce, I walked into the town Post Office and officially became the town’s resident wacko. The clerk said he had Forever Stamps and he also said he did not sell many and couldn’t understand why more people did not use them. Figuring there must be a catch to what seemed to me like a great deal, I asked if there was a limit on the number I could buy. He said the limit was whatever amount he had in stock.

Source: How I learned to love postal rate increases