There is absolutely no need to hoard Elvis, as you can order them online (unfortunately I can’t find Janis):
There are 86 stamps, listed–the majority of them Forever. So for a mere $801.75 you can order 100 booklets (a nice round number) of 16 stamps each–a total of 1600 Elvis Forever stamps ($1.75 for shipping). [Unfortunately if you only wanted to order 1 of those booklets they would still charge you about $1.50 shipping]
I have 347 stamps in my arsenal. I pay bills for my father-in-law, who is in a nursing home and lately have been paying bills for my next door neighbor who is in rehab and probably going into a nursing home, in addition to our bills. I’m stocked up for a while.
But wait! There’s good news.
The cost of a two-ounce letter is going down from 71 cents to 70 cents!
And a three-ounce letter is going to be a whopping bargain: down from 92 cents to 85 cents.
Start kicking yourself now for stocking up on those two-ounce forever stamps.
And if you bought any three-ounce forever stamps, tsk-tsk.
They should just raise it to $1 per stamp and be done with it. Get them to stop complaining that they’re operating at a loss and maybe improve their service. Mail service is a convenience not a right.
My retirement plan of investing in stamp futures just went down the drain.
Thanks for the heads up, PastTense. I buy stamps for my 92-year-old father, who’s in a nursing home and whose favorite pastime is writing letters. He uses about 400 stamps per year. So by purchasing stamps today, I saved $20 this year. Worth the trouble IMHO.
Whoever thought up the idea of Forever stamps was brilliant.
The USPS does a great job, and they’ve really stepped up with package delivery. I prefer to receive packages via the Post Office than via USPS.
Traceability. Also, all these withdrawals are in 1 log. And for vendors and things where the spending is tax deductible, you can easily look up a year’s worth of transactions from the records on your bank’s website so you can claim the tax deduction.
Similarly, if someone claims you owe a fee because you didn’t pay in time, the bank’s records will show when the check was mailed, thus taking the onus off you onto the post office.
PM me and we can make that happen.
In Canada, domestic stamps are $1, stamps to the States are $1.40, and overseas stamps are $2.50(!). I know this because I recently wrote a letter to my cousin in England. 
So a mere 55c? Ha!
Mail service is a very important service of the government. The post office is actually older than the constitution.
We take it for granted now, but being able to communicate with other people in the country for a very reasonable cost was something that truly did change our nation, in what I think are positive ways.
Huh, what shipping company do they use?
As for me, I’d consider it a bad thing to not be able to mail an envelope at all, so if I were running low on stamps, I might buy some… but I think it’s been years since I’ve actually had occasion to stick a stamp on something. And the frequency of stamp use is probably only going to decrease in years to come. It’s within the realm of possibility that I’ll never even use some of the stamps I already have lying around, and against that I have to weigh… the possibility that if I do run out, I might have to spend a couple more bucks when I eventually buy more? Meh.
That’s what quickbooks is for.
And my bank doesn’t have an easily searchable history log. I can look to see when I bought something at home depot or somesuch, but I can’t look to see all the times when I bought something from home depot, not without actually going through line by line.
I can do that with a vendor’s report on quickbooks.
That could be slightly useful, but only assuming that vendors are willing to take my bank’s word for it for an excuse. For anything important, like my rent checks, I use registered mail.
I actually kind of enjoy addressing and stamping envelopes. There’s like a tactile sense of accomplishment in it. But when I think about it, I haven’t done it for probably a year. It’s only once in a blue moon that I get some correspondence that can’t be handled online.
Last year (okay, the summer of 2017), I wanted to send some money to charities in Fort McMurray, AB after the big forest fire. When trying to do so online proved fruitless, I decided to write $25 checks to the Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity and mail them. I was quite shocked to find that postage to Canada was $1.35, but I paid it and sent them off.
At the end of the year, I got tax receipts for whatever the exchange rate was when the checks were received at cashed - $29.xx for one and $30.xx for the other.
I have an online resale business I run out of my home, and 99%-plus of those packages are shipped via USPS, and I will continue to do so as long as it’s the cheapest and most reliable method.
The Post Office still makes plenty of money. The ONLY reason that there’s any fiscal issue is because the idiot Congress saddled them with a requirement to pre-fund 75 years worth of pension payments.
We buy a sheet (12) of the Chinese New Year stamps every year. We still haven’t used up the 2017 ones, so I guess we use less than one stamp a month. We used to pay quarterly property taxes and life insurance premiums by mail. But that’s all online or autopay now. The last stamp we used was for the town census. There is an odd medical bill or two a year. Responded to an IRS inquiry. Twice a year payments to the Math and Piano schools. Nothing else I can remember.
Oh yeah, interesting thing, in the US, anyway, you get to write off stamps as well as tax deductions.
I was mostly saying that in jest. But it is the case that fewer people are using the USPS, and that is having an effect on their bottom line.
So, looked at my bank, and I don’t see anywhere that allow me to get them to cut checks for me. I may need to ask about it. Not that it is that big a deal, but did just write out and mail my quarterly payments.
I was at the PO anyway to send a package, so I bought Forever stamps, why not?
Just a reminder: You have until this Saturday to buy some one-ounce Forever Stamps at the old price. Get 'em while they are cheap.
And if you have any letters between 2 and 3.5 ounces to mail, wait until Monday and get a bargain!
You know what’s bullshit? A forever stamp is worth 55 cents and it costs $1.15 to mail a letter to Canada. I have to use three forever stamps over the extra five cents since I’m obviously not going to the post office just to save 50 cents.
#firstworldproblems